by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I had a couple of videos I had in mind for last night’s
program, and the first was a VAI release of a 1981 concert in Madrid by the
great Spanish-born soprano Montserrat Caballé with pianist Miguel Zanetti.
Caballé was in great form in a program that didn’t make any major demands on
her, one of those this-and-that song recitals that worked up chronologically
through the history of music — it began with Baroque selections like an aria
from the oratorio Juditha Triumphans by
Vivaldi, the familiar “Caro mio ben” by Giovanni and/or Tommaso Giordani
(misspelled “Giordano” on the chyron) and an aria from the opera Adriano
in Siria by Galuppi; then it moved into the
Classical era with a lovely aria from the French version of Gluck’s Armide and a surprisingly good piece by Antonio Salieri,
the composer Peter Shaffer (and Alexander Pushkin before him!) cast as Mozart’s
murderer, literally and figuratively, from an opera called Les Danaïdes. It’s time to rehabilitate Salieri from all the Amadeus calumnies: though hardly at Mozart’s level he was a major composer, and this aria, “Où suis-je?,” was
excellent even though during the long instrumental introduction I missed
hearing the orchestra that would have originally accompanied it. Zanetti was a
perfectly fine pianist (though on the first few Baroque selections I found
myself wishing he were playing harpsichord!) but he’s just one person and
Salieri’s music pretty clearly demanded the weight and power of a full
orchestra. The concert then moved into slightly more familiar territory, though
even so it was clear Caballé and Zanetti were programming towards the obscure:
an aria from Bellini’s little-known opera Bianca è Fernando and another from the Temistocle opera by the relatively unknown composer Pacini. (A
while back I heard an Opera Depot release of a Temistocle opera by Johann Christian Bach, one of Johann
Sebastian’s sons — J. S. Bach had 20 children and 12 of them grew up to become
professional musicians — and was mightily impressed; Mozart named J. C. Bach as
one of his key influences, and it showed. But Pacini was hardly in the same
league as a composer as Bach Söhn.)
Then Caballé ended up in the late 19th/early 20th
centuries with five songs by Ravel, by far the most major “name” among the
composers represented: Three Hebrew Songs and one-offs (including a parody song in German) and two by Bizet,
before she headed into three Spanish songs as her encores. The concert was
given in 1981 at the Teatro Real in Madrid, and not only was the venue called
the “Royal Theater” but King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia (dressed in normal
clothes — monarchs, even relatively powerless constitutional ones, don’t go
about in fur-trimmed robes anymore) were in attendance and it was a benefit for
her charitable fund. Charles and I were watching this as an envoi to the recently departed Caballé, and it worked as
such even though there was a sameness to the material — almost all of it in
slow or medium tempi, evoking a mood of reverie and not offering Caballé much
chance for coloratura fireworks or the kind of haunting, floating high-register
pianissimi that were one of her
vocal trademarks. I had had this disc in the backlog for some time mainly
because when Charles and I watched the companion Caballé disc in VAI’s catalog
— two Spanish telecasts, a 1971 concert performance of the first act of
Bellini’s Norma and another
televised recital with Zanetti in 1979 — the Norma performance had been subtitled but the songs hadn’t
been. They weren’t this time around, either, which left Charles and I pretty
much at sea over what the songs were about — and Caballé’s diction, though considerably better than Joan
Sutherland’s (I remember on the previous VAI disc Caballé sang a song in
English, “Oh, had I Jubal’s lyre,” and she sang it more clearly than Sutherland
had even though Caballé, unlike Sutherland, did not come from an English-speaking country), wasn’t that
great shakes and Charles confessed he sometimes had trouble telling whether she
was singing in Italian or Spanish.
