Your Discovery of the Year

[BerlinExpat]

What I find with so many of these productions is that the singing just isn't up to scratch - and that the orchestras used are simply too provincial.

If a recording gives me the opportunity to hear something I'd otherwise never get to know, then I'm quite willing to accept a poorer recording/interpretation so that I can determine whether any particular piece of music has fallen into obscurity or disrepute justifiably or not. There are numerous instances of initial public reaction to a piece or its critics condemning it to the history books when a modern re-appraisal can help us to verify the original viewpoint or not, as the case may be.
Please don't be too disapproving of provincial theatre, Alan, – here in Germany at least it often produces a more acceptable interpretation of a piece without the triple A stars that the heavily subsidised houses often foist upon us to no artistic avail. Without the provincial opera in Germany we wouldn't have recordings of works that would otherwise have gone unheard in our lifetime; e.g. D'Albert's Die schwarze Orchidee from Augsburg, Gounod's La nonne sanglante from Osnabrück and Gomes' Il guarany from Bonn to name but a few!
Whatever the recording's shortcomings I'm immensely grateful to listen to an opera that isn't even mentioned in my 1980 New Grove!

[Alan Howe]

Below-par singing and orchestral playing severely compromise the enjoyment to be had from recordings of unsung opera, in my view. OK, it's handy to find out whether a certain piece is any good or not, but too often the result is simply not good enough for repeated listening.
As for the provincial theatres in Germany, I agree - the standards are often very high. I myself lived in Germany in the seventies and can testify to this; however, with the recording of Mameli, we're not talking about a provincial German performance, but one emanating from the Ukraine.
I'm glad that Mameli turns out to be a rather good opera, but I want to be able to enjoy the singing and playing...

[petershott@btinternet.com]

I'm in two minds here. On the one hand I agree with Alan that no-one much wants to devote precious money to acquiring a recorded performance of an opera that is below one's expected standard in terms of performance or recording. Such things, in my experience, tend to get played once and then languish on the shelves unplayed for years. And one never discards them if they happen to be the sole recording of the work in question. One simply can't, as Alan says, enjoy them.

But then we've only got into this position because of the very superior audio equipment that has become available to us after the demise of the 78. The LP was wonderful, but I can recall my amazement with the introduction of the CD that the whole of an act could be fitted onto a CD and that one no longer had to leap from the chair to turntable in the middle of an act and even perhaps remove the fluff from the stylus before resuming one's listening. We now demand the 'best' possible performance and have lost the capacity to enjoy anything that isn't of the same standard. The whole business of comparative reviews and awarding of ratings and stars in the magazines encourages this. And, most obvious of all, we listen to our operas in our comfortable living rooms and not in the theatre. True enough, it is quite marvellous not to trudge through the rain to the opera house and then to sit two rows behind an overweight lady constantly stuffing chocolates into her face (my last experience at ENO). But at the same time we have irretrievably lost a huge amount in no longer being able to, as it were, smell the greasepaint and engage with an actual performance.

To illustrate: a good number of years ago I was lucky to catch three different productions of Die Meistersinger within a six month period. One took place in the Empire Theatre in Liverpool. The theatre was (astonishingly) half-empty, and one was often conscious of the sound of the trains rumbling below ground coming into Lime Street station. All the hallmarks of a 'provincial' production perhaps, and doubtless if a recording company had been there I dare say the discs issued would have got a proper drubbing. However in terms of a musical production in a theatre it was unquestionably the most moving performance of the opera I have ever seen - it completely knocked sideways the two other star-studded and prestigious productions I saw in the same period.

Moral: through the availability of high standard performances straight into our living rooms via high standard reproduction equipment we've become trapped, and can no longer enjoy or even tolerate anything below that. And that's a relatively recent phenomenon and, sadly, it results in us losing so much.

By chance I've just been re-reading Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality. Rousseau's complaint is that we over-fed, disease and pain free citizens might well yearn for the natural life where all was apparently good and wholesome. But we've now become so accustomed to property, hospitals, schools, policemen, transport systems and so forth that we've got to a point where we can no longer go back through history to the time before we put up fences around our patch and invented meum et tuum. The apparent benefits of civilisation have corrupted us and we have rushed headlong into our chains. Likewise because of our reliance upon excellence in performance and our superior hi-fi we've become trapped into a situation where the enjoyment to be had from opera recordings is severely compromised if we've confronted by below-par singing and orchestral playing ...and especially if such recordings emanate from the Ukraine!

I've also got a friend working in the (in my view pretty dubious) area of cognitive psychotherapy. She tells me that many of her well-heeled clients have become so habituated to pornography that when confronted by the real thing they curl up in horror and dismay. Fortunately I can manage quite well without my porn. But perhaps, says me with impish grin, a lavishly produced boxed set of an immaculately prepared, studio bound, star-studded, triple A rated recorded opera performance is the new kind of porn. Blu-Ray as opposed to blue film?

But, ahem, both moderator and commentator have wandered quite away from the thread.

[Alan Howe]

Methinks you over-complicate, Peter. I just take no pleasure from listening to unpleasant-sounding voices and scratchy orchestras. Put simply: the point of a recording is to perpetuate a performance. So the performance needs to be worth perpetuating in the first place. I'm not after perfection (otherwise my collection would be pretty small), but opera recordings in particular require a lot of skill to pull them off; a couple of microphones and some recording equipment brought to some third-rate theatre just aren't good enough...

[JimL]

It would have to be Waghalter, for me.  Although I've done some relistening of the Karlowicz Violin Concerto, and the structural similarities are striking (although there are some variances as well).

[petershott@btinternet.com]

Do I over-complicate things? I think you're probably right, Alan. Sometimes a simple task such as tying up the bootlaces can present itself as a major conceptual minefield. Maybe it is having a background in philosophy, where nothing can be taken for granted, all notions have to be dissected, and every step has to be carefully thought through.

No matter. But I think my claim that (in Rousseau like language) we have been 'corrupted' by repeated exposure to top notch recordings still holds true. For example, nothing now can quite match the sheer thrill and excitement of a 13 year old boy trapped in a glum boarding school listening to a Ring cycle with an exceedingly grotty little transistor radio under the bedclothes and following the libretto with his torch. Those were the days, but then not for anything would I go back to them!

[BerlinExpat]

Re: Leoncavallo's Mameli - a small clarification

The recording wasn't made in the Ukraine, but in Sondalo, Italy. As far as I can gather from the Italian press it was the conclusion of a tour with concert performances in at least Messina, Palermo and Monaco. The main orchestra is Ukrainian with supplementary musicians from an Italian orchestra. One choir is Italian and the other Albanian. The singers are mostly Italian as is the conductor. The performances were billed as the first since the première in Genoa in 1916.

[Alan Howe]

Thanks for that useful clarification, Colin. I only had scant online info to go on, although I can hear enough of the performance from the excerpts at jpc to have a pretty good idea what it's like - i.e. not very good. I repeat: opera is very hard to do on a shoestring and it really needs to be done well. 

Ah, Peter. Those were the days. I too listened to many an opera performance on a transistor radio; and I bought the odd pirated set of LPs of something exotic when I lived in Germany - usually in terrible sound. However: the Wagner I heard broadcast was usually from somewhere like Bayreuth or Covent Garden or Sadler's Wells, so it was often brilliantly sung and played. I can't say I remember listening to Wagner from Sondalo or somesuch. And the pirated LPs at least preserved something worth preserving - such as Sutherland, Corelli et al. in Les Huguenots from La Scala - even if the sound was terrible.

I realise that poorly-sung opera is a problem for me. I was always of the John Steane school of vocal appreciation - i.e., although I admire singers who are great interpreters (e.g. Callas, Pears), I find their vocal flaws excruciating to listen to. To this day I still cannot stand anything sung by Pears and I find much of Callas' singing post the mid-fifties a trial. Give me Tebaldi or Price any day. And so, when it comes to provincial recordings of opera, the results can be really terrible - as so much of Bongiovanni's catalogue demonstrates, I'm afraid. So I'll be giving Mameli a miss - with great regret, of course.

[alberto]

 Maybe I come too late.
My choice is Rabaud's Symphony n.2. Since a longish time I didn't hear a "new" (for me) fine late French romantic symphony (the last had been d'Indy's Italian Symphony).

[DennisS]

Alberto, you beat me to it! I had already posted re- the Rabaud symphony in the New Recordings thread, and was thinking that I would nominate this symphony as my discovery of the year when I read your post. I must say that this symphony made a striking impression on me!

[Alan Howe]

The Rabaud is an exciting find, of that there is no doubt.

[Amphissa]

The Ribaud Sym 2 is not yet released in the U.S. So maybe it will be my discovery of the year for 2013. 

[vcsam]

For me it was finally getting to listen to Christmas Eve by Rimsky-Korsakov. A gorgeous, magical opera which would be more ideal than anything I can think of as  Christmastime opera for families, instead of the inevitable Hansel, masterpiece though it is. Hansel simply has nothing to do with Christmas, while the Rimsky has everything to do with it. I would live to see the Met put it on.

[jerfilm]

Off topic, Alan, but I agree.  And Beverly Sills used to drive me crazy with her warbly, off pitch vibrato.....
Jerry

[Alan Howe]

I agree, Jerry. I couldn't listen to Sills either. Far too much vibrato.