Verdi: Ave Maria (from Otello)

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.

A real rarity, this. Verdi, famous for his operatic masterpieces, also found time to scale down his stage sentiments to the recital hall (or, in his time, the salon) to write songs. Throughout the 19th century, Italian opera composers wrote songs for the salon as part of their stock-in-trade. The texts were mostly conventional, harping more often than not on the string of unrequited love, sometimes venturing into the naively picturesque; while the accompaniment would be confined to simple thrummings suggestive of a guitar or an orchestral reduction. The settings would vary in scale from the strophic ‘romanza’, to the full length ‘scena ed aria’. In Italy, the salon was never far from the theatre. One of the 20th-century’s greatest singers – Margaret Price – went into the studio with Australian-born pianist Geoffrey Parsons to record music relatively neglected by recording companies, then, as now. And the results are at once, charming and revelatory. A considerable rarity, the disc returns to circulation on Eloquence.

The acclaimed soprano Christine Schäfer is making her label debut for Sony Classical with a highly unconventional aria album. The arias she has recorded range in time from Handel to Messiaen, and in style from virtuosic belcanto to the drama of Verdi and the serenity of Richard Strauss.

Christine Schäfer’s first-ever recital of operatic arias is a carefully composed musical essay that combines popular and lesser-known works. This highly personal programme is no selection of greatest hits, but a journey of adventure in search of musical beauty. In the manner of a resounding essay Schäfer takes well-known but intentionally diverse pieces from the Baroque period to the present and relates them to each other in unexpected ways. Seductive as they are on their own, in this changed context each seems to have been illuminated anew.

The orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonieorchester Berlin under Julien Salemkour is the singer’s artistic counterpart and peer, and can shine in a variety of roles.

Leading tenor, Rolando Villazon, has personally selected 34 great Verdi tracks, sung by the great names of the present and past, both to celebrate Verdi at 200 and to inspire a new generation with the composer’s great arias, powerful choruses and popular tunes.

The tracklist is framed by two stirring overtures, it includes famous numbers by all the leading singers on DG and Decca (as well as a couple from EMI), including Roberto Alagna, Carlo Bergonzi, Grace Bumbry, Joseph Calleja, José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, Renée Fleming, Anna Netrebko, Luciano Pavorotti, Katia Ricciarelli, Joan Sutherland and BrynTerfel. There are rousing choruses and several extracts from the Requiem too. It’s a splendid 150-minute collection.

The striking cover includes one of Rolando’s inimitable Verdi sketches, and will include a sticker incorporating a photo of the artist. The all-colour booklet has an article by journalist Richard Lawrence which also takes in some quotes from the artist in a recent interview for this release.

Villazón is confident that every excerpt on these discs will make the listener want to hear the complete work. “No other composer creates such an immediate link with the audience. Go to see La traviata: you hear those rhythms, those melodies, that dramatic force, and you are drawn into his world. It doesn’t matter whether you love opera or know nothing about it: it just captures you, it grabs you.” Listening to the numbers from La traviata here, you have to agree.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi, Preiser Records is delighted to offer this 2 CD digipack at a special price. A Tribute to GIUSEPPE VERDI features iconic recordings of his most famous works and recordings from various labels over the period 1914-1962. A true collectors’ edition.