Vincenzo Bellini

Cecilia Bartoli presents Vincenzo Bellini’s “Norma” like you have never heard it before – a new complete studio recording of one of the most iconic operas in music history, in its original form.

For generations Bellini’s “Norma” has been looked at from the vantage point of the Verismo era at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now Cecilia Bartoli unveils the opera’s original pre-Romantic style and colour by taking Norma back to its roots.

For the first time ever the entire music is recorded with period instruments from Bellini’s time. Traditional cuts are reinstated. Keys and tonalities are put back into place and the music is executed according to Bellini’s own tempo indications. A new critical music edition was compiled from the autograph score and many manuscript sources.

During the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Decca recorded a number of albums with some of its key conductors of Overtures. Many of these were singled out by the press for their terrific sound quality (the fabled ‘Decca Sound’) and for their often adventurous programming. Some of them also included entr’actes and intermezzi. Prized as collectors’ items, many of the original LPs exchange hands at high prices. And most of these reissues, in Decca Eloquence’s ‘Romantic Overtures’ series appear in CD, in part or whole, for the first time.

Romantic Overtures – Volume 5 is a collection of Overtures and Intermezzi from grand Italian opera. Thugs drowning blind women, a mountain lass buried in an avalanche, a cup of poison for two… this is the stuff of this highly entertaining CD conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni, who conducted several recordings of Italian opera for Decca. Mascagni is represented by his little known operas Le maschere and Guglielmo Ratcliff; the operas La Wally and Norma not by their single ‘big’ arias, but by Preludes. And to round off the original – and extremely rare – 1956 LP (entitled ‘Great Moments from Italian Opera’), we have the Prelude and ‘Dance of the Hours’ from La Gioconda.

A glittering selection of operatic highlights and arias, featuring great composers and artists who are all celebrating significant anniversaries in 2013.

Montserrat Caballé was one of the most stimulating and refined singers in opera, concert and recital in the second half of the 20th century. Born in Barcelona on 23 April 1933, she studied at the Barcelona Liceo and made her concert debut there in 1954. After opera engagements at Basle and Bremen and guest appearances in Milan, Vienna and Lisbon, she became a major international star in 1965 when she substituted for an ailing Marilyn Horne in a concert performance of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia in New York. Her long and highly successful career has encompassed a wide range of repertoire, including roles in a number of demanding bel canto operas in which she followed Maria Callas, who had brought these works back into public favour.

This CD, together with the 5-CD set The Sound of Montserrat Caballé, is being released to mark the diva’s 80th birthday.

The recital opens with the aria ‘Son vergin vezzosa’ sung by Elvira, the daughter of an English Puritan nobleman, to express happiness at her forthcoming marriage to the Cavalier Arturo in Bellini’s I puritani. But her joy gives way to madness when she wrongly believes Arturo has betrayed her, and her extended mad scene that begins ‘O rendetemi la speme’ is one of the high points in the bel canto repertoire. These two items give Caballé the opportunity to demonstrate her exquisitely beautiful voice and also to make use of her outstanding technical ability to sing florid music, as well as bring it to life dramatically when required. Next comes the closing scene from Bellini’s Il pirata, another long scene in which the heroine Imogene is deranged by grief as she watches the man she loves ascending the scaffold to be executed. This is another feast of bel canto singing at its most accomplished.

We then move to Verdi and his unfortunate heroine Aida, torn between her love for the dashing Egyptian soldier Radamès and her beloved homeland Ethiopia as she awaits him in a secret desert assignation: ‘Qui Radamès verrà...O patria mia’. Caballé then gives us a superb account of the poignant scene in Don Carlo where the queen Elisabetta recalls how happy she was in France when she was betrothed to Don Carlo, a Spanish prince, before she was forced for political reasons to marry Don Carlo’s elderly father, King Philip II of Spain

In the next aria, ‘Pace, Pace, mio Dio’ from La forza del destino, Caballé, tackles perhaps the most dramatic of the arias heard here. Leonora, a Spanish noblewoman, believing her lover to have deserted her after he accidentally killed her father, is living as a hermit in a cave in the mountains. She longs for the peace that death will one day bring her, but her solitude is interrupted by the abrupt arrival of a stranger at the entrance to her cave.

Verdi was a great admirer of Shakespeare and the programme ends with extracts from his settings of two of the bard’s plays. These are the eerie Sleepwalking Scene from Macbeth where Lady Macbeth is re-living in her dreams the horrendous murder of King Duncan that she carried out earlier in the play, and the poignant Willow Song and Ave Maria from the final scene of Otello where Caballé’s Desdemona is heartbreakingly moving.

Montserrat Caballé was one of the most stimulating and refined singers in opera, concert and recital in the second half of the 20th century. Born in Barcelona on 23 April 1933, she studied at the Barcelona Liceo and made her concert debut there in 1954. After opera engagements at Basle and Bremen and guest appearances in Milan, Vienna and Lisbon, she became a major international star in 1965 when she substituted for an ailing Marilyn Horne in a concert performance of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia in New York. Her long and highly successful career has encompassed a wide range of repertoire, including roles in a number of demanding bel canto operas in which she followed Maria Callas, who had brought these works back into public favour.

This set, together with the recital CD Montserrat Caballé Sings Bellini and Verdi, are being released to mark the diva’s 80th birthday.

The first CD consists of extracts from two of the high points of the bel canto repertoire: Il pirata and I puritani, both by Bellini. These two operas feature extended mad scenes which give Caballé the opportunity to demonstrate her exquisitely beautiful voice and limpid tones, but also to make use of her outstanding technical ability to sing florid music, as well as bring it to life dramatically when the action requires it. She is partnered by her tenor husband Bernabé Marti in Il pirata and by another distinguished Spaniard, Alfredo Kraus, in I puritani.

CD 2 begins with the principal soprano aria: ‘Sombre forêt’, from Rossini’s last masterpiece Guillaume Tell and then a long duet in which Caballé, as the Austrian Princess Mathilde is joined by Arnold, the Swiss patriot in love with her and sung by Nicolai Gedda. These are followed by two further powerful duets, the first from Donizetti’s Roman tragedy Poliuto and the second from Meyerbeer’s archetypical French grand opera Les Huguenots; Caballe’s partner in both cases is Bernabé Marti. The disc ends with scenes from Verdi’s treatment of the story of Joan of Arc, which bears little resemblance to the historical facts but provides a feast of wonderful singing for Caballé and her two partners here: the tenor Plácido Domingo and the baritone Sherrill Milnes.

The next CD covers arias and duets from three of Verdi’s greatest operas: La forza del destino, Don Carlo and Aida. Caballé’s male partners in the duets are again the tenor Plácido Domingo and the baritone Sherrill Milnes, and the conductors are Anton Guadagno (La forza del destinio), Carlo Maria Giulini (Don Carlo) and Riccardo Muti (Aida).

Verdi was a great admirer of Shakespeare and CD 4 introduces us to his settings of two of the bard’s plays, with the eerie Sleepwalking Scene from Macbeth and the poignant Willow Song and Ave Maria from the final scene of Otello, where Caballé’s Desdemona is heartbreakingly moving. After the aria ‘L’altra notte in fondo al mare’ from Boito’s Mefistofele, we come to a group of arias by Puccini whose music suits Caballé to perfection. Her gallery of Puccini heroines includes Manon Lescaut, Mimì, Tosca and Madama Butterfly, all sung with her unmatched beauty of tone and superb characterisation.

The final CD comes to the era of verismo, with extracts from the highly dramatic one-act opera Cavalleria rusticana by Mascagni, and the triumphant love duet that closes Giordano’s Andrea Chénier as the two protagonists go together to death on the guillotine during the French revolution. The programme concludes with another group of well-loved Puccini characters including Loretta from Gianni Schicchi with her beautiful ‘O mio babbino caro’ and both the loyal slave girl Liù and the cruel, imperious Chinese Princess Turandot, from the opera of the same name. In all of these arias, Caballé shows a perfection of voice and performance that are unique to her and that have never been surpassed by any other soprano.