RECITAL – PARIS
La Turca
Monteverdi La mia Turca che d’Amor non ha fè (for solo voice)
Donizetti Là sedeva, sull'erton verone La Sultana
Vivaldi Se cerca, se dice L’Olimpiade
Rossini 8 ariette "Soirées musicales" 3. La partenza
Donizetti D’un cor che muore Maria Stuarda
Donizetti Tu che voli gia spirto beato No, qui morir degg’io Fausta
Pacini Ai mortali, o crudo, ai Numi Saffo
Donizetti Foan, Foan! Ahi misera Cantata Saffo for solo voice and piano
Mayr O furie, che un giorno Medea in Corinto
La zingara
Bizet Le matin L’Arlesienne
Verdi La Zingara from six romances
Donizetti Torna all'ospite tetto...Vieni o tu, che ognor io chiamo Caterina Cornaro
VANIDADES
LE FIGARO
Her recitals at the Athenée Theatre were a source of happiness. And that happiness derived from three reasons: her exceptional musical refinement, astonishing vocal mastery and ever-present intelligence…This last quality left us alone with a six-faced mirror which could have only been imagined and realized by her; Leyla Gencer, who’d become the queen of La Scala after Callas. No, she didn’t try to impress us with a diva attitude. Her rules are seriousness and perfection. The beauty is a detail. Her breath control makes the voice vibrations spread magnificently! What she accomplished with Handel’s Alcina aria, will remain as a perfect example of an interpretation.
And what about Maria Stuarda’s lament, Sapho’s song and Donizetti’s Cantate? There was the sorceress in her black dress. A merry and laughing Diva who saw herself so gloriously in her mirrors!
Nothing was enforced. It seemed like a cat and mouse game between the Diva, her brilliant pianist Vincenzo Scalera and the audience. A spectacular season opening !
THE BELCANTO OPERAS by CHARLES OSBORNE
Principal characters:
Fausta (soprano)
LIBRETTO by Domenico Gilardoni (completed by Gaetano Donizetti)
In the spring of 1831, while Donizetti was busy
composing his two one-act operas, Francesca di Foix and La Romanziera e l'uomo
nero, the German composer Felix Mendelssohn arrived in Naples for a stay of
several weeks. Contemptuous of Italian composers in general and of Donizetti in
particular, Mendelssohn wrote: ... Donizetti finishes an opera in ten days. Of
course it may be hissed, but that is no matter, as it is paid for just the
same, and he can then go about enjoying himself... but he sometimes spends as
long as three weeks on an opera, taking considerable care with a couple of the
arias, so that they will please the public and he can then afford to enjoy
himself once again, and go back to writing rubbish."
The last of the operas Donizetti composed during 1831 was Fausta, which he worked on in the autumn, and which was staged at the San Carlo on 12 January 1832. Domenico Gilardoni, his usual Naples librettist, died at the early age of thirty-three while at work on Fausta (whose provenance, probably an Italian play, is unknown), and Donizetti himself completed the libretto, possibly with help from Andrea Leone Tottola.
Fausta was a success at its première in Naples, and in December 1832 it was staged in Milan to open the carnival season at La Scala, where it was performed thirty-one times during the season. For these Milan performances Donizetti composed an overture, and later added other numbers to the score for the opera's production in 1833 in Venice, in 1834 in Turin, and for a revival at La Scala in 1841. Fausta was also staged in Madrid, Lisbon and Havana during the 1830s, and in Vienna in 1841. It was first performed in London on 29 May 1841, and was unfavourably received in Bergamo in 1843. After being revived again at La Scala in 1859, it disappeared from the world's stages until 27 November 1981 when it was produced at the Rome Opera with a cast headed by Raina Kabaivanska (Fausta), Renato Bruson (Costantino) and Giuseppe Giacomini (Crispo). Though it has not been staged since then, Fausta was given a concert performance during the 1987 Donizetti Festival in Bergamo. It has not yet been performed in the United States.
The tragic plot of Fausta is strong in dramatic situations. Fausta, married to the Emperor Constantine (Costantino), is in love with her stepson Crispo, who in turn is in love with Irella (called Beroe in early editions of the score), a Gallic princess whom he has captured in his war against the Gauls and brought to Rome. When Fausta confesses her feelings to Crispo he expresses his horror, at which she threatens to kill Irella if he does not accede to her desires. Pleading for the life of his beloved, Crispo falls on his knees before Fausta, at which point Costantino enters. Thinking quickly, Fausta tells her husband that his son is in the process of declaring his incestuous love for her, to which information the emperor responds by condemning his son to exile. Fausta's father, the former Emperor Massimiano, is delighted at this turn of events, for he plans to murder both father and son in order to regain the throne. Later, attempting to foil Massimiano and his fellow conspirators, Crispo attacks Costantino by mistake, and is arrested and condemned to death. Fausta attempts to persuade Crispo to flee with her, but again he rejects her. In despair, Fausta swallows poison, and Crispo is led away to execution. Costantino learns too late that his son was innocent of attempting to kill him, but at least has the satisfaction of ordering the execution of Massimiano. When Fausta, now dying, confesses all to Costantino, he orders her to be executed as well. She insists, however, on dying where she is and, as she breathes her last, the chorus informs her that she is the greatest monster the world has ever seen.
There is a reasonable degree of truth embedded in Gilardoni's overwrought libretto. In the year 310 A.D., Maximian, the father of Fausta, attempted to revolt and was put to death by Constantine the Great who, sixteen years later, had Fausta and Crispus, his son by his first wife, executed for adultery. It is in 326 A.D. that, according to the libretto, the action of the opera takes place, at a time when one of its principal characters had, as a matter of historical fact, been dead for sixteen years.
The score of Fausta is disappointingly uneven, and much of it is commonplace. The heroine herself, whose situation is not unlike that of Racine's Phèdre, is given some fine dramatic opportunities, but the characters of her husband, Costantino, and her stepson, Crispo, come to life only intermittently, and that of her father, Massimiano, not at all. After a nondescript overture, the introductory scene augurs well, for it is a large-scale affair containing an opening chorus, a prayer ('Dea, che siedi in terzo cielo') which is Fausta's opening utterance, a trio, and an extended reprise of the triumphal chorus. But even here some of the choral writing is singularly uninspired, and in the following scene (added to the opera in 1841 for a Milan revival, and thus the latest part of the score to be composed) there is little of interest beyond an oddly Verdian phrase -sung to the words 'Fausta non è colpevole'-in the duet ('Spinto da quella smania') for Costantino and Crispo.
That Fausta is a rewarding role for a first-rate dramatic coloratura soprano is first revealed by the cavatina, 'Ah! se d'amor potessi' (lifted from Il Castello di Kenilworth), which calls for a finely spun legato line an aria for a Sutherland, a Gencer or a Caballé - and whose cabaletta, 'Fuggi l'immagine', is an effective piece of claptrap. But throughout the opera much of the accompanied recitative is ploddingly mundane. Fausta's Act I duet with Costantino is lacking in individuality, nor is her subsequent duet with Crispo, in which she attempts to seduce him, at all worthy of the strong dramatic situation. The Act I finale begins splendidly, but its stretta is pedestrian.
In Act II, Massimiano has a mechanically contrived solo ('Beato momento"), the aria for Crispo added to the score in Turin in 1834 is rather dull, and there is little of interest in the senate scene, though Costantino's quite conventional aria, T'amo ancora', is not unattractive. The duet for Fausta and Crispo, 'Per te rinunzio al soglio', which was added to the score for the Venice performances in 1833, is a sad, graceful piece, one of the opera's more impressive numbers, though its allegro conclusion is unsatisfactory. By far the best number is the solo finale for Fausta. Her cavatina, "Tu che voli già spirto beato', with its emphatic cabaletta, 'No, qui morir degg'io', brings the opera to an applause-inducing end, and is much more compact than the otherwise not dissimilar finale of Anna Bolena. Given a really fine interpreter of the title-role, Fausta could prove enjoyable, though it is hardly one of Donizetti's more interesting or original scores.
PARIS RECITAL 1981
If we were speaking of a pianist, a program like this could be defined in the “style of Busoni”. ln the case of a singer, we cannot but refer to what the great primadonnas of the past usually proposed in their academies, with the obvious aim to give the audience a complete picture of their vocal and interpretative qualities. So, for instance, Giuseppina Strepponi would pass with great confidence from a singing di agilita to a dramatic one, from the semi-comic - if not totally comic - to the tragic repertoire. A kind of experience that today very few sopranos can afford. Undoubtedly Leyla Gencer is to be included in this narrow circle of elected, and what’s more, among the very first ones. There is no use in discussing about the timbric glamour of either voice, since the subject offers wide margins to personal appreciation. What really matters is the result, and as far as this Turkish soprano is concerned, the results are so exceptional to make history.
Thus, her wide repertoire testifies not only the technical and interpretative qualities of the most celebrated models of the past (qualities that may also be found in other sopranos belonging to that special “Olympus” we mentioned above), but above all it evidences a really uncommon; musical versatility and intellectual brilliance. And it is just thanks to her extraordinary intelligence that Ms. Gencer could give a contribution of fundamental and unquestionable importance to the Donizetti Renaissance and that she was also able to bring back characters like Medea, Norma, Lady Macbeth and many of Verdi’s heroines to their authentic nature of belcanto.
The program of this Parisian recital is oddly organized in different moments: each one with its own title, or better its own theme, highlighting a side of Leyla Gencer’s multiform personality, starting just from her native roots, always deeply felt by this great artist and recently strengthened thanks to the new “Leyla Gencer” contest for young operatic singers in Istanbul.
But the hidden threads connecting the different pieces of this recital are really well characterized, with selected rare pieces and very refined musical combinations (La Partenza, one by Beethoven and one by Rossini on the same text by Metastasio; an aria from Pacini’s Saffo on a text by Cammarano dated 1840, followed by Donizetti’s Cantata Saffo for soloist, choir and orchestra, dedicated to his wife, Virginia Vasselli; the Lamento e morte di Maria Stuarda by Carissimi in addition to the finale of the opera by Donizetti; an aria from Medea in Corinto by the Bavarian composer Mayr, teacher of Donizetti, dated 1813 and based on a text by Romani).
This recital offers countless vocal wonders, not last the whole, intact vocal means boasted by Mrs. Gencer, whose demanding career in 1981 had been lasting for over thirty years. Her control of the filature and the pianissimos is still perfect. How beautiful are Leyla Gencer’s pianissimos: those sounds made of nothing that made her famous, intangible sounds and yet so “present” in a concert hall or a theatre, a signature of a very personal, unique and unmistakable vocality. And her incisive interpretation is well known: impeccable stylistic control, very variegated phrasing, clear diction. In short, something from another time. From every point of view.
Recording Excerpts
