Simone Kermes - Lava: Opera Arias from 18th Century Napoli
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Artist: Simone KermesEdition: Music CD
Format: Import
CD Release Date: 2009-09-22
Music Label: Sony Uk/Zoom
Music reviews of Lava: Opera Arias from 18th Century Napoli
Music Review: "Putting on the Agony, Putting on the Style ....
Rating: 5 Stars
... that's what all the singers were doing all the while," to paraphrase the American folk-poet Woody Guthrie. Baroque opera seria was devoted to the Agony of Love, and Baroque vocal technique was above all devoted to Style, to stylish displays of virtuosity, especially among sopranos, whether the singers were women, falsettists, or castrati. Technical display and emotional affect were, of course, not always readily compatible; only the finest Baroque operas integrated virtuosity and expression. It was a formalistic art, addressed to an audience of connoisseurs, and when that audience was broadened, musical values had to adapt. The 'fall from grace' of the castrati was less a result of social revulsion at a barbarous practice than of a shift in the aesthetic balance between musical and dramatic values.
Simone Kermes offers a 'clinic' in Baroque vocal virtuosity on this CD of arias from operas composed between 1722 and 1744, by composers loosely associated with the theaters of Naples, at that time the second-largest city of Europe and certainly a musical capital. The operas were not all premiered in Naples, however; first performances occurred also in Rome, Venice, and Dresden. The composers represented on this recording are Nicola Porpora, Giovanni Pergolesi, Leonardo Leo, and Leonardo Vinci -- all Italian, though three of them worked internationally -- and the renowned Johann Adolf Hasse, an 'Italian' by predilection and by marriage. The arias have been selected from nine different operas, seven of which have never been recorded before. Naturally, these are showcase, climatic arias, settings of texts expressing the most intense passions, sustained by the most picturesque and affective instrumental accompaniment. All twelve of the arias on this CD, to my ears at least, are superb examples of successful integration of vocal virtuosity and dramatic expression, of Agony and Style. If the operas from which they are taken are uniformly as excellent as these arias, one can ardently hope that they'll be staged and recorded in a opera house nearby, so that 21st C audiences can catch up with the aesthetics of 18th C opera patrons.
The expressive demands of these arias are huge. The texts range from outcries of rage and despair, Pergolesi's "tu me da me dividi" on track 1, for instance, to sighs of dreamy ecstasy, Pergolesi again, on track 12. Likewise the texts depict images ranging a storm at sea to the singing of a bird in a cage. Simone Kermes handles these demands with extraordinary flexibility, matching the timbre of her voice to the affect of the words phrase by phrase. She doesn't just sing everything prettily. She growls when a growl is needed, moans or snarls when a moan or snarl is wanted, and she soars beutifully when beauty is appropriate. Likewise her control of dynamics, especially her delicate piano passages and her fabulous "mesa di voce" (sustained notes that crescendo and decrescendo smoothly without changing timbre or pitch, and without vibrato) are all focused on affective declamation of the text. Every aria on this CD sounds like the voice of a different stage character at a different dramatic climax.
The technical vocal demands are even huger. Tuning, of course, is the sine qua non of music. Many lovely voices have faltered over tuning. Kermes's tuning is as flawless as humanly imaginable, across a range from her deliberately rough-edged masculine contralto to her 'flauto dolce' coloratura. To match her singing pitch for pitch, I'd need two instruments, the left-thumb notes of my Baroque bassoon for her lowest tessitura and my Venetian cornetto for her highest. It's not the goal of such dramatic vocal colorations to sound uniform in timbre across such a range, though I suspect Kermes could do so if she chose. In one aria, she descends from sky to earth, a leap of about two-and-a-half octaves, in a phrase of just four notes. Her breath control is olympic.
Fiery passagework and florid ornamentation are the 'elements of style' in the rhetoric of a Baroque aria, and once again Kermes offers a clinic, an encyclopedic 'survey', of the trills and frills of 18th C virtuosity. Best of all, her fancy-work isn't just standardized off-the-shelf decoration; every diminution and every mordent sounds the emotive unity of text and music.
I've almost exhausted my stock of superlatives, but I need to chant the praises of the period-instrument orchestra Le Musiche Nove and its conductor Claudio Osele. The same expressive flexibility that Simone Kermes achieves is matched by the instrumental ensemble, as each aria has its distinctive color and tempo. If you've ever thought that all the arias on a recital album sounded the same, you'll be gloriously surprised by this one, with its exciting variety from sparse, somber continuo to flamboyant counterpoint and athletic obbligatos by the oboes and flute. Osele is a musicologist as well as a conductor; his notes for this CD will appeal to both scholarly and popular taste, and the texts of the arias are included in Italian with English, French, and German translations. Osele himself prepared the critical editions and playing scores for this program. Bravo, maestro! Brava, signorina! Bravi, i musici!
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