De los Ángeles: “Post-Romantic” Songs

Readers may recall that the “lion’s share” of opera recordings in the Victoria de los Ángeles: The Warner Classics Edition; Complete Recordings on His Master’s Voice & La Voix de son maître anthology occupied what I called the “post-romantic” category. This is also the case where arias and songs are involved. As might be expected, a significant portion of that category is devoted to the Spanish repertoire.

What struck me the most in listening to that repertoire was the diversity of “sub-genres” within that category. Thus, in addition to songs that are attributed to a specific composer (who often is providing a “personal twist” to traditional music), the individual albums traverse categories that include not only “Spanish Songs” but also “Songs of Andalusia,” “Songs of Catalonia,” “Sephardic Songs,” and “Zarzuela Arias.” It is also worth noting that the “Songs of Andalusia” category includes the subtitle “Music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance.”

Cover of the original vinyl album of the Hunter College recital by Victoria de los Ángeles accompanied by Alicia de Larrocha (from the Amazo.com Web page for this album)

Personally, I tend to prefer recordings of recitals to the “studio-made” albums. Readers know that I have already cited de los Ángeles’ contributions to the “retirement recital” given by pianist Gerald Moore. However, there is also a French recital album, whose entire repertoire consists of “post-Romantic” compositions by Henri Duparc, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel. Then there is the 1964 recital in the Royal Festival Hall (again with Moore), which includes composers such as Joaquín Rodrigo, Manuel de Falla, and Joaquín Nin. Several years later, Angel released an album of a recital given “on this side of the pond” at Hunter College, with pianist Alicia de Larrocha accompanying de los Ángeles. That program is distinguished for its account of the two major song cycles composed by Enrique Granados, the Colección de Tonadillas and the Colección de canciones amatorias.

The fact is that these last two paragraphs account for only the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to the closing of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Attentive listeners will find this genre to be the “mother lode” of de los Ángeles’ repertoire. I have only just begun to appreciate the richness of that repertoire, and I expect to spend a fair amount of time getting to know it better!

DOREMI Releases Second Julian Bream Album

courtesy of Naxos of America

Some readers may recall that, in January of 2019, this site ran an article about the latest Legendary Treasures release on the DOREMI label. This single CD consisted of live performances of the young Julian Bream at two Aldeburgh Festivals in 1958 and 1959. About a month and a half ago DOREMI released a second Bream album in this series, this time consisting of two CDs. This one is entitled A Tribute, and it consists of both concert performances and broadcasts. Once again, the album presents Bream playing both lute and guitar.

This time there are recordings from four Aldeburgh Festivals. The opening track is another selection from 1958, and the other tracks date from 1963, 1964, and 1965. In addition, there is one selection from the 1964 Edinburgh International Festival, which is distinguished because it is the only offering thus far to present a concerto with accompaniment by an ensemble. As many will probably guess, the music is the “Concierto de Aranjuez” by Joaquín Rodrigo; and the ensemble is the Scottish Chamber Orchestra with Alexander Gibson conducting.

The broadcasts were all made by the British Broadcasting Corporation. One took place in the Concert Hall of Broadcasting House in 1956, and it consisted of Bream accompanying soprano Carmen Prietto in a selection of Spanish songs, as well as the opening movement of the fifth of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras compositions. The other tracks were taken from studio recitals in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Many of the performances include identification of the music being performed by a radio announcer.

Over the course of his career, Bream recorded the Rodrigo concerto five times. Unless I am mistaken, my own “first contact” took place in my freshman year in the early Sixties as a result of my work at the campus radio station. As I recall, it was a studio recording; and, unless I am mistaken, this new album provided my “first contact” with any concert performance of the concerto. As a result, there is a sense of spontaneity in Bream’s performance, probably due, at least in part, to his positive chemistry with Gibson. The same can be said for his recordings with tenor Peter Pears at Aldeburgh, both of a generous share of compositions by John Dowland and the world premiere performance of Lennox Berkeley’s Opus 65, Songs of the Half-Light.

On the other hand Bream never seems to connect as intimately with Prietto’s vocal selections. More interesting is the arrangement of Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken III/8 string quartet in D major for lute, violin, viola, and cello. Bream was joined by members of the Carmirelli Quartet, presumably Pina Carmirelli herself on violin with violist Luigi Sagrati and cellist Arturo Bonucci. The balance of the instruments was surprisingly effective; and, since this was an Edinburgh Festival performance, one cannot necessarily attribute that success to microphone placement. My guess is that Haydn’s ghost would have been delighted by this alternative approach to one of his earliest quartets.

Taken as a whole, this second volume is, for the most part, an engaging listening experience. I suspect that many of those that had encountered the first volume would have come away asking for more. Adding two CDs to the collection will probably be appreciated by many.

A New Voice in San Francisco

I spent the better part of the day at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, since a Graduate Piano Recital at 11 AM was followed by a San Francisco Performances event for which I had purchased tickets at the beginning of the season. This latter performance was the final event in their "Young Masters Series," consisting of the San Francisco debut recital of mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard. Ms. Leonard certainly deserves to be called a "young master," since she has already made her Metropolitan Opera debut (as Stéphano in Charles Gounod's Roméo et Juliette) and has sung Zerlina in the Chicago Opera Theater production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni and will sing Cherubino this summer in the new Santa Fe Opera production of Le Nozze di Figaro. Nevertheless, the circumstances of her schedule make her new to San Francisco.

Her selection for a program was particularly interesting. For one thing all the selections fit within the span of a single century, although that century happened to begin in 1890. For another it was refreshingly polyglot, with songs in Spanish (Joaquin Nin and Manuel de Falla), German (Hugo Wolf and Arnold Schoenberg), French (Reynaldo Hahn), Russian (Serge Rachmaninoff), and English (Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Meredith Wilson, and Richard Rodgers). I tend to be skeptical about opera singers venturing into both cabaret songs and show tunes. However, Leonard did both (Schoenberg providing the cabaret repertoire) and pulled it off more than effectively, first by recognizing that these songs were not the same as the other "art songs" on the program and second by endowing her performance with a level of theatrical smarts that was neither too much nor too little.

Since some of that skepticism came from my recently recorded impressions of Heidi Melton's Schwabacher Debut Recital last month, I should also observe that Leonard did not have that problem of scale that had frustrated me at the Melton recital. The Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music is on a scale comparable to the Temple Emanu-El auditorium (the site of Melton's recital); but Leonard had a good sense for how to project into this space without overwhelming it with an intensity intended for a full-sized opera house. Indeed, she was so good at maintaining a proper level of energy that she had enough strength at the end of the recital to give three encores, two of which featured music that she had prepared for Roméo et Juliette and Don Giovanni. Those theatrical smarts also cultivated a well-understood sense of the diversity of the program she had prepared, which made for a much broader sense of variety than I had experienced at the Melton recital.

When programs are so diverse, I tend to dwell, as I did in writing about Melton, on those selections that are personal "old favorites" (usually associated with memories of first hearing them at recitals during my concert-going days in Manhattan). The "old favorites" that Leonard offered to me were six selections from Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch (which I had the joy of hearing performed in its entirety at one 92nd Street Y recital) and Falla's Siete canciones populares españolas (for which, at the latest count, I have two recordings). Leonard had an excellent feel for the Falla songs, which are definitely "art songs" rather than "popular songs," that feel being one of an almost impetuous spontaneity. There was less of that variety in the Wolf selection, but she still endowed each song with a distinctive personality. These "old favorites" helped whet my appetite for the works that were unfamiliar to me and left me hoping that Leonard will be returning to San Francisco for further performances in recital, with the San Francisco Opera, or with the San Francisco Symphony.