Fortune smiles
Lest by my last post, you think me sharper than a serpent's tooth — this evening I am overflowing with gratitude. My fairy godmother has been hard at work, and two wishes have been granted.
The Antoinette Halloran/Rosario La Spina Puccini CD made it to iTunes today. The CD in its entirety is significantly cheaper online than in the flesh, but even so, all I wanted was Antoinette and so that's all I downloaded. Just as I expected, she's beautiful. And not just generically beautiful; Antoinette gives a series of intelligent, vivid and individualised performances. Her Mimi and her Tosca are easy to tell apart. (The Rodolfo and Cavaradossi she's paired with sound pretty identical.) Magda and Cio-Cio San are both singing of dreams, essentially, but they're very different kinds of dream and Antoinette makes the distinction clear. Every now and then, there's a turn of phrase which is quite startling in its beauty. At the end of "Si, mi chiamano Mimi", she manages the final, self-deprecating words — "Altro di me non le saprei narrare. Sono la sua vicina che la vien fuori d'ora a importunare" — without a trace of the irritating little-girlishness I've heard in others. The climax of her "Un bel di" is quite alarmingly moving, determined optimism suddenly giving way to a savage, heartrending release of long pent-up fear and desperation. This kind of idiomatic and totally committed performance leaves recent bland releases by one or two other "stars of Opera Australia" I might mention quite in the shade. Right now her name tends to come preceded by the words "rising soprano". May she rise and rise, just as high as she wishes; should she desire it, I think she'd conquer hearts around the globe.
To the second wish. This one took a little longer in the granting.
Almost two years ago, I wrote a rambling post about the Dido operas of Cavalli and Purcell. It concluded with these words:
"I've been a fool for Purcell ever since The Fairy Queen introduced us. And, to keep this paragraph going in circles, I encountered The Fairy Queen on account of Yvonne. All of which makes me think that what I really would like is Yvonne Kenny as Purcell's Dido. Except that then, of course, you'd probably never shut me up."
Well, it looks as if you're never going to shut me up. In the course of various internet wanderings, I found this sentence at the end of Yvonne's Askonas Holt bio:
"Future engagements include Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” for Opera Australia."
Usually if I express these wishes in writing, I figure it's a guarantee they won't be granted. This time, however, a cherished dream has come true. How cherished? Consider:
Dido's Lament was one of the very first operatic arias I came to know; when I started playing the piano again for fun, I had begun with showtunes, but when I ran out of them, I returned to "easy classics" books I'd used when I was taking lessons. Dido's Lament was one of my favourite pieces to play; all the more so when I realised it appeared on Barbara Bonney's Fairest Isle, another musical love which predates my proper conversion to opera fanaticism.
Purcell is among my favourite composers.
The reason I really started loving Purcell was the DVD of the ENO's Fairy Queen, starring Yvonne, which I loved so much I structured a semester long research paper around it.
One of the many reasons I really started loving Yvonne was, therefore, Purcell.
I'd rank Dido and Aeneas among my top five favourite operas.
I adore the character of Dido in any incarnation, musical or otherwise.
I already know Yvonne makes an astounding Dido. She is Cavalli's Didone. (I'm no longer anything like as indifferent to Cavalli's opera as I was when I wrote the above-linked post.) And I'm prepared to state, as somebody who is only about five recordings short of owning her complete recorded output, that her Didone is quite possibly the best recording she has ever made — electrifying, musically glorious and completely devastating. She inhabits that character with majesty, grace and breathtaking emotional intensity. If she brings that same glorious power to Purcell's Dido, then forget funeral pyres — she'll set the stage alight.
That makes two wishes. According to tradition, that leaves me with a third. I'll make it this — that the above news is linked to these paragraphs, from a recent article about Philip Picket, currently at the Perth International Arts Festival with the New London Consort:
"Pickett's research into music of the pre-classical period has led to some fascinating collaborations. With Peter Holman, a Purcell specialist, he has created a full-evening version of Dido and Aeneas.
The best-known version of the opera is that performed at Josias Priest's school for young gentlewomen in 1689 or 1690: a little masterpiece lasting about an hour. Pickett and Holman have reconstructed performances given in 1700 at Lincoln's Inn Theatre in London, which had extra music by the theatre's music director John Eccles. It included, for example, a prologue for Mars and Peace, a whole scene for the witches, trumpets, and all the spectacle of 18th-century opera.
"It's a full-length evening with a big orchestra, and it's very theatrical indeed," Pickett says. "Rather than being a gentle court masque, it's much more like our idea of an opera, with a lot of colour and drama. It's incredibly vivid.
"You can't appreciate some of these early works unless you hear them in different ways. They were performed in different ways almost every time they were performed. There was no such thing as one set way."
The opera has been performed in concert and will be fully staged by director Jonathan Miller for the Chelsea Festival in London in June. Pickett says there is talk of a possible tour of Dido to Australia in 2009."
I live in hope. And in the meantime, am very, very, very happy.
