Tenor Cornel Frey (Jacquino) and soprano Christina Landhamer (Marzelline) provide winning contrast as the hapless couple, but the beautiful voice of bass Georg Zeppenfeld (Rocco) does not compensate for insufficient characterization. You won’t necessarily be able to figure out who’s who from the booklet, which neglects to connect singers with roles, but baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle sounds nowhere mean enough for the evil Don Pizarro. Nor is Elsner the only example of miscasting. Elsner pales beside Davidsen in their duets, sounding far weaker than he should. In the spring days of my life), sounds from the throat of a man who is far beyond the spring of his career. In des Lebens Frühlingstagen” (God! What darkness here!.
Florestan’s great opening aria, Act Two’s “Gott! Welch Dunkel hier!. I suppose one could say that he’s singing in the voice of a starving and dehydrated prisoner, but that will simply not do for Beethoven’s music. Elsner only sounds fresh and lovely lower in his range when he rises higher and puts the voice under pressure, as must any self-respecting tenor who sings this heroic role, he sounds stressed and vitiated. “It is me!”Įlsewhere, however, many of the other principals disappoint. Listen, for example, to her softer radiant and tender singing in the middle of the ecstatic duet, “O namenlose Freude!” (Oh, what boundless happiness!), when Florestan and Leonore sing (in translation), “It is you!”. Never does she seem stressed, and never does her voice sound less than beautiful. While I prefer the extra duration she gives to the climactic high note of “Abscheulicher!” on her recent Decca recital, the fact that she here rises up to that note with commanding strength and then completes the rest of the phrase in a single breath serves as testament to rock solid technique. 33 at the time of the recording, she sings with such commitment, urgency, and strength as to justify comparison with the other great Leonores on record.
Five months later, after the stage could be enlarged to enable the choristers to sing at a safe distance from each other, choruses were set down and then patched in.ĭavidsen, who has been winning award after award, vindicates her reputation as the most vocally equipped and expressively voiced dramatic soprano of our time. Miraculously, two months after the canceled performance date, all the principals found themselves again in Dresden, where voices and socially distanced orchestra were set down in the Kulturpalast. This new high-resolution Pentatone issue was planned as a live performance, but the pandemic intervened.
0 kommentar(er)
