MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2024
60,000 reviews
... and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger

REVIEW


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Chandos recordings
All Chandos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 

Buy through MusicWeb
for £12 postage paid World-wide.

Musicweb Purchase button

Sound Samples & Downloads

Emilio de Gogorza (1872 – 1949) - Operatic arias and songs
rec. 1903 – 1928
NIMBUS PRIMA VOCE NI7922/3 [63:58 + 54:13]

Experience Classicsonline


I must confess that I had only a very nebulous idea of Emilio de Gogorza’s voice, career and place in operatic history before I undertook to review this double disc, but some listening and research have opened up to me a fascinating talent and an unusual individual.
 
I was first aware of him through his impressive recorded duets with Marcella Sembrich, Enrico Caruso – to whom de Gogorza introduced the idea of a recording contract - and Emma Eames, his second wife whom he married in 1911. In December 1905 he had gone on tour with Eames and returned smitten. A further tour in Europe the following year cemented their affair and after protracted and scandalous divorce proceedings he secured his freedom from his first wife at a price rumoured to be $100,000. Eames, too, had obtained a divorce in 1907 from celebrated portrait painter Julian Story. De Gogorza and Eames themselves eventually divorced, acrimoniously – she was not, by all accounts, an easy woman and he evidently had a roving eye, despite his urbane demeanour and immaculate manners.
 
But enough gossip; it is his artistry which counts here. He had a smooth, powerful baritone and exceptional linguistic gifts which would have lent themselves to the performance of opera were it not for the fact that de Gogorza was short, myopic and had a pronounced limp; his photographs reveal a dapper little man with a preposterous waxed moustache and elegant sartorial taste. A possibly apocryphal anecdote tells us that his only attempt to sing opera resulted in his taking a tumble into the prompter’s box. It is in any case certain that he avoided the stage and made a long and prosperous career as a recitalist in concert performances and from recording prolifically – over a thousand recordings whose sustained popularity undoubtedly helped to fund the considerable personal outgoings resulting from his complicated personal life. He was recording from 1900 – and thus a recording pioneer – into the electrical period, when he remade some of his best-selling acoustic discs. He then retired in 1930 from recording and the concert platform and turned to teaching at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where among his voice students was future composer Samuel Barber. He was effectively the house-baritone for the Victor Talking Machine Company for a quarter of a century, and all the records here are from that source.
 
Like Caruso, his voice was made for recording, as long as - again like, Caruso - its amplitude could be tamed by the primitive acoustic process. His versatility in style and languages and his crystalline diction allowed him to become one of the first genuine crossover artists, sometimes recording under various pseudonyms to avoid over-exposure. The selection of songs here eschews the more egregiously populist hits like the parlour song “Juanita” and leans more towards art songs – although there are no Lieder and some more light-hearted and folk numbers are included.
 
It is ironic that so successful and admired an artist should now be familiar to collectors and opera buffs mainly through his duets with more widely known singers and that so few previous releases have been devoted to his solo work. We have only five duets in this collection and none with Caruso, presumably because they have already been given wide currency. This compilation certainly goes a long way towards rectifying the omission and presents us with ample evidence of de Gogorza’s range and ability.
 
It is extraordinary to think that this disc allows us to listen to recordings most of which were made around a hundred years ago; it really is a window – well, a sonic time-capsule – onto the past. On track 2, we hear the extraordinary, fluting voice of de Gogorza’s first touring partner Marcella Sembrich. When they were on tour, you may be sure that he was very much the junior partner, but by this stage in 1907, two years off Sembrich’s retirement from the stage, they would have been on more equal terms. On four other tracks we hear the voice of Emma Eames, which is not dissimilar to that of Sembrich. De Gogorza is always suave and stylish; Don Giovanni’s Serenade is a model of seductive charm and restraint. He has excellent breath control, a firm tone and an alluringly fast, vibrant vibrato. I am very amused by the nasal, falsetto sneers with which he caps each strophe of that demonic little ditty of an aria for Méphistophélès. It gains all the more by its juxtaposition with the succeeding aria for Wolfram from “Tannhäuser”, sung by de Gogorza with grave beauty. It is followed by an intense characterisation of Rigoletto, a pitiless Conte di Luna and a tortured Renato, in which aria he exhibits a wonderful legato – versatility, indeed. It would be otiose to go through every aria methodically; suffice to say that everything is expertly delivered and every character vividly differentiated.
 
The second disc of songs is a different bag of pretzels, but de Gogorza brings the same verbal acuity and musical nuance to the merest tune. He is never rhythmically flaccid or indulgent and ranges easily between the stately pathos of “Caro mio ben” and jaunty, dotted rhythm Mexican folk songs. Spanish, English, French, Italian and Neapolitan dialect are all sung with aplomb. Caruso, who was not as skilled a linguist, also made gold of this kind of repertoire, perhaps under de Gogorza’s guidance and advice. You will have your favourites as I have mine – which is, I think, the delicate “Bergère Légère”. There are curiosities, such as Elgar’s “The Pipes of Pan”, so typical of the “faery whimsy” that gripped England around the turn of the century and into the 1920s. The last item, Debussy’s “Romance”, is the only electrical recording and allows us to hear more of his exquisite mezza voce, his idiomatic French and very little deterioration in quality of tone.
 
Given that this is such a welcome and thoughtful offering from Nimbus, it’s a shame that their quality control did not extend to spotting the usual errors in the track-listings and, more seriously, the fact that the date of de Gogorza’s death is printed in large font in the notes and on the back of the CD as 1935 – although John Steane gets it right in the text of his article: 1949.
 
The sound is the result of usual Nimbus “Ambisonic” process, whereby the original shellac discs are recorded when played through a horn in a small, purpose-built to scale concert hall. The result is warm, pleasing and largely hiss-free with a welcome reverberance, but not too much.
 
I have been unable to find dates or biographical details for the song composers Zapata and Nicto on CD 2 and would welcome any reader being able to supply these.
 
I also acknowledge my indebtedness for some of the information above to articles in the Nimbus CD notes by John Steane and by Uncle Dave Lewis on the allmusic website.
 

Ralph Moore
 
Details
CD 1 (arias):
Charles GOUNOD (1818 - 1893)
1. Faust - Dio possente [2:24]
Ambroise THOMAS (1811-1896)
Hamlet
2. Doute de la lumière* [4:18]
3. O vin dissipe la tristesse [3:47]
Jules MASSENET (1842–1912)
4. Le roi de Lahore - Promesse de mon avenir [3:52]
5. Hérodiade - Vision Fugitive [4:13]
Emile PALADILHE (1844 – 1926)
6. Patrie - Air du Sonneur [4:04]
Charles GOUNOD (1818 - 1893)
7. Faust - Dio Possente [4:25]
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756 - 1791)
8. Le nozze di Figaro – Crudel! Perchè finora # [3:06]
Don Giovanni
9. Là ci darem la mano # [3:22]
10. Serenata [1:56]
Hector BERLIOZ (1803 – 1869)
11. La damnation de Faust - Sérénade [1:57]
Richard WAGNER (1813-1883)
12. Tannhäuser – O du, mein holder Abendstern [3:41]
Giuseppe VERDI (1813 - 1901)
13. Rigoletto – Pari siamo [4:06]
14. Il trovatore – Mira di acerbe lagrime # [3:48]
15. Un ballo in maschera – Eri tu [4:40]
Eugeno DIAZ DE LA PENA (1837 – 1901)
16. Benvenuto Cellini – De l’art splendeur immortelle [4:10]
Ruggero LEONCAVALLO (1857 - 1919)
17. Pagliacci – Prologo [3:40]
Jacques OFFENBACH (1819 – 1880)
18. La chanson de Fortuno [2:28]
CD 2 (songs):
Sebastián YRADIER (1809 – 1865)
1. La Sevillana [3:00]
Salvatore SCUDERI (1845 – 1927)
2. Dormi pure [3:34]
Émile PALADILHE (1844 – 1926)
3. La Mandolinata [2:57]
Giuseppe GIORDANO (1748 – 1798)
4. Caro mio ben [3:55]
Sebastián YRADIER (1809 – 1865)
5. La Paloma [4:06]
Mexican Traditional
6. Noche serena [2:45]
Fermín Maria ALVAREZ ( ? – 1898)
7. El Celoso [2:15]
José Manuel ZAPATA
8. La luna [3:03]
Tito MATTEI (1841 – 1914)
9. Non è ver [4:29]
E.A. MARIO (1810 – 1883)
10. Comme se canta a Napule [2:57]
NICTO
11. Teresita mia [3:00]
English Traditional
12. Drink to me only with thine eyes [3:12]
Edward ELGAR (1857 – 1934)
13. The Pipes of Pan [4:05]
Jean-Baptiste FAURÉ (1830 – 1914)
14. Crucifix # [3:04]
André-Joseph EXAUDET (1710 – 1762)
15. Menuet [2:50]
Jean-Baptiste WEKERLIN (1821 – 1910)
16. Bergère Légère [2:08]
Claude DEBUSSY (1862 – 1918)
17. Romance: Voici le printemps [3:12]
* with Marcella Sembrich
# with Emma Eames

 

 

 

 


 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools






Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.