An idol in Vienna,
Alfred Piccaver (1884-1958) was born
in England, grew up in New York (working
in Edison’s laboratories amongst other
things; he trained as an electrician),
studied singing in Prague and Milan
and made his debut in 1907. By 1912
he had a permanent role with the Vienna
Court Opera and star status as the local
reigning Puccini and Verdi tenor, though
he was equally admired in the French
repertoire and in some Wagner. He retired
in 1937 and moved back to his home country
just before the start of World War II.
But Vienna loves its tenors, as I witnessed
during the Jan Kiepura celebrations
a year or two ago when every other shop
seemed to be plastered with Kiepura’s
beaming face, and the lure was too strong
for Piccaver who spent his final years
there, dying in 1958.
This is the second
in Preiser’s Piccaver series and gives
us twenty-four sides made in 1923. The
quality of the original Grammophons
is high and the remastering has extracted
an excellent amount of detail from what
were, in any case, well-engineered discs.
The voice is forward and always perfectly
audible. Piccaver first recorded in
1912 and his earliest sides find him
in freshest voice, exercising his sovereign
legato and remarkable breath control
with allied beauty of tone. Twenty years
later, when he made his last series,
the voice was subject to frailty but
in 1923 it was still a flexible and
rather beautiful instrument. So here
we catch him, albeit recorded acoustically,
in full voice without many attendant
technical failings.
His Donizetti is forthright
and bold and in Verdi’s Pardi veder
le lagrime we can hear his famous
mezza voce. This is a good example of
his art but it’s programmed next to
La donna è mobile (recorded
at another session going by the matrix
numbers that Preiser routinely gives
– not all reissue companies show such
consideration). The latter features
something of a besetting sin of Piccaver’s
as exemplified here and that’s an inert
sense of rhythm. The legato is laid
on and the rallentandi sound forced.
The bad here is balanced by the extract
from Un Ballo in Maschera which finds
him with enviable control of line and
a subtle impersonation and good depth
of characterisation. We get an idea
of how and why he had made such a stir
in French opera from the two arias from
Faust and Carmen (watch out; tracks
eight and nine and reversed); Salut
demeure chaste et pure is light
grained and attractive albeit not especially
urgent – Piccaver was certainly not
a histrionic tenor at the best of times,
which nullifies his Recondita armonia.
Ponchielli tests his breath control
– there are "blips" on long
held notes but otherwise his technique
is equal to pretty well all demands
placed on it. And it’s good that we
end with the aria from Giordano’s Fedora
which shows conclusively that the beauty
of tone, so much a feature of those
1912-14 sides, was still very much part
of Piccaver’s vocal armoury, resisting
the inroads of time and overuse. It’s
a beautiful piece of singing.
Jonathan Woolf
Alfred Piccaver (tenor) with unnamed accompaniments
