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Rossini : Joanne Boag (soprano), Caryl Hughes, Imelda Drumm (mezzo), Barry Banks, Robin Tritschler (tenor), Chorus and Orchestra of Welsh National Opera / Carlo Rizzi (conductor), Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 1. 6.2008 (GPu)

Overture: Semiramide

Il pianto delle Muse in Morte di Lord Byron

Il pianto d’Armonia sulla morte di Orfeo

Le nozze di Teti, e di Peleo


It is still too easy to think of Rossini as simply (simply!) the greatest operatic composer of his age. That he certainly was. But gradually we are coming to realise that there was much more to Rossini even than that. The late work, notably the Péches de vieillesse, is played (and enjoyed more and more); recent years have seen several competing series on CD of the piano music from the Péches. The Messa di Gloria, the Stabat Mater and the Petite Messe Solennelle all get a fair number of performances and have been recorded several times. The earlier, youthful sacred works largely await rediscovery. Musicological scholarship – and the related impetus provided by the annual Rossini Festival in Pesaro – has, though, led to the rediscovery, performance and reassessment of some of Rossini’s non-operatic vocal music. But such works have only very rarely been performed in Britain and it was enterprising of WNO to put on a concert anthology of Rossini’s cantatas. A healthy audience at this first of two performances will hopefully encourage similar ventures.

The concert began, as any concert of Rossini surely should, with an overture. That for Semiramide (premiered in Venice in 1823, and the last opera Rossini wrote for an Italian opera house) received a fine performance full of controlled dynamic contrasts and delightfully natural transitions between its various sections. The passage for four horns and two bassoons in the andantino section was a particular joy and the pizzicato work of the string section added an inviting allure counterbalanced by the heroic volleys of percussion. This is one of Rossini’s larger and more complex overtures, but it maintains that lucidity of orchestration one expects from the Rossinian overture, and treats is hearers to a fine closing crescendo on the more or less standard Rossini model. The momentum in Carlo Rizzi’s performance was absolute but not remotely crude, the effect thoroughly exhilarating.

The overture to Semiramide was followed by a work written just one year later, in London. Lord Byron had died on April 19, 1924, aged only thirty-six, while fighting for Greek independence from Turkish rule. Byron’s moral reputation – rumours of incest with his sister, of sodomy, of fierce drinking bouts and much else – had ensured that polite English society regarded him with distaste (Lady Caroline Lamb’s “Mad, bad and dangerous to know” summed up the general attitude). But English hypocrisy being what it is, there were many who know saw Byron as heroic, a type of the man who chose to give up his life for another people’s just cause. One form which commemoration of his death took was a concert held at Almack’s Assembly Rooms (in King’s Street, St. James) on June 11, 1824. Rossini had been in London since the previous December, supervising a season of his work at the King’s Theatre and his contribution to the memorial concert was a brief cantata (it lasts less than eight minutes), setting an anonymous Italian text, in which the composer himself performed as tenor soloist. It is probably a safe bet that he was a less accomplished Rossinian singer than Barry Banks, a Rossini specialist and a fine lyric tenor, who seemed on particularly good form here and elsewhere in the concert. Il pianto delle Muse in Morte di Lord Byron is no masterpiece, but it is music of high competence and eloquently expressive. The writing for solo harp is delightful (redeploying a melody from Maometo II), the vocal writing fluent and grateful (at least Banks made it sound so) and the work ends with a lovely closing cadence. The text is so highly generalised that it would serve as the tears the Muses might shed for well nigh any poet – and, in Rossini’s setting, any poet would be very lucky to get it.

The first half closed with a longer ‘pianto’, Harmony’s complaint on the death of Orpheus. This, extraordinarily enough, was written as an exercise (which won a prize) at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna, and premiered there on the 11 August 1808, when Rossini was some months short of his eighteenth birthday. In the specialised sense one might call this a ‘masterpiece’ – i.e. a piece which demonstrated his mastery of the musical craft, a kind of affirmation that he was now ready to make his way in the musical world. Even the choice (assuming it to be Rossini’s) of subject constituted a kind of claim for a place – however minor as yet – in the musical tradition, a place in the long line of Italian composers to have treated the story of Orpheus. With a striking Orchestral Sinfonia by way of introduction (in which it is hard not to hear anticipations of later Rossini), examples of recitative and solo aria (one of the two is sung with chorus) and a chorus, the work gave its youthful composer the chance to show something like the range of his abilities. The text (was it chosen by Rossini or ‘set’ by his teachers?) is a turgid piece by one Girolamo Ruggia but, as so often was the case later, the inadequacies of a libretto don’t seem to hamper Rossini. In both recitative (the cello accompaniment to one of these, ‘Ma tu che desti’ is especially lovely) and arias, Banks was again both disciplined and lyrical. The work – youthful and relatively slight as it may be – was played and sung with commitment and respect, and it certainly deserved such treatment.

The concert’s second half was devoted to a single work of some length (some 45 minutes), Le nozze di Teti, e di Peleo. Here Barry Banks (as Peleo, Peleus for English readers of Greek mythology) was joined by several other soloists; Katarina Karnéus was billed to sing the role of Teti (Thetis) but illness prevented her performing, and she was replaced by the young Welsh mezzo Caryl Hughes; Giove (Jove) was sung by the Irish tenor Robin Tritschler, Cerere (Ceres) by Imelda Drumm and Giunone (Juno) by Joanne Boag. This cantata was written for the wedding of the Duc de Berry and the Bourbon Princess Maria Carolina and first performed on April 24 1816 at the Teatro del Fondo in Naples. It is a mature and sophisticated work, though lost until Philip Gossett discovered the autograph manuscript in the Naples Conservatory in 1966. The work’s overture was played with an infectious rhythmic lilt and was full of witty and inventive writing before concluding with magical radiance. In the solo arias, duets, trios, choruses and closing quintet there are many borrowings and echoes from Rossini’s earlier work – notably from Il barbière di Siviglia (which had had its premiere in Rome only a couple of months previously), La scale di seta, Torvaldo e dorliska and Il Turco in Italia (amongst others). Banks confirmed his credentials as a consummate Rossini interpreter (and Rizzi, one might add, showed once more what a fine Rossini conductor he is). Caryl Hughes acquitted herself pretty well, even if she lacked the absolute Rossinian finesse so obvious in Banks’s singing; just occasionally her vibrato slightly masked the note and spoilt the agility of Rossini’s lines, but in general this was a very promising performance, particularly impressive at the top end of her voice. Her duet singing with Banks was a delight. Imelda Drumm was every bit as assured as one nowadays expects her to be, her coloratura singing richly expressive, her heavy-toned mezzo voice blending well with the lighter soprano of Joanne Boag, effective in the minor role of Juno. The young tenor Robin Tritschler sang with clarity and accuracy as Jove, and his future career (he joins Welsh National Opera as an associate artist in the 2008-2009 season) as he adds further subtleties of interpretation and vocal flexibility to the force and intelligence with which he already sings. They made a winning team in an exhilarating performance of this cantata, in which Rossini’s music (even if much of it was less than ‘original’) transcends both the limitations of its dully conventional libretto by Angelo Maria Ricci, a compendium of the clichés of allegorical flattery, and the long-forgotten significance (and the ill-fated outcome) of its original occasion.

One hopes that the dedicatees of Le nozze di Teti, e di Peleo were properly grateful for such a splendid wedding present; Byron would no doubt have had some sardonically witty remark to offer about Rossini’s musical tribute to him, and by 1808 Orpheus (in whatever realm of the afterlife he was to be found) was probably thoroughly weary of the efforts of composers and poets to tell his story or paint tribute to him – the work of a mere student could hardly have aroused his interest! For those of us without a vested interest in any of these works – those of us merely happy to enjoy Rossini’s music and some fine singing and playing, this was certainly a grand occasion.

Glyn Pursglove

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