RAI Don Giovanni with Stich-Randall, Molinari-Pradelli
david...@aol.com
live Don Giovanni with Stich-Randall as Donna Anna on Opera d'Oro that
I picked up from Berkshire for a song a couple of summers ago. It
turns out to be a GREAT performance. Here's the cast:
Donna Anna: Teresa Stich-Randall
Donna Elvira: Leyla Gencer
Zerlina: Graziella Sciutti
Don Ottavio: Luigi Alva
Don Giovanni: Mario Petri
Leporello: Sesto Bruscantini
Masetto: Renato Cesari
Commendatore: Heinz Borst
Orchestra e Coro della RAI di Milano
Francesco Molinari-Pradelli, conductor
Milan, 26 April, 1960
Every single one of these musicians is just that, a real musician,
and, in the case of the singers, an intelligent and thoroughly
involved singing actor or actress. Molinari-Pradelli not only turns
in by far one of the best performances I've ever heard from him but
one of the best performances of this opera I've ever heard. The tempi
throughout are reasonably brisk, and the rhythms are projected both
reasonably strictly and with a lot of backbone: you rarely hear the
intricacies in the accompaniment of "Metà di voi" as securely and
accurately projected, the tiny motives in it so distinctively and
sinisterly delineated. At the same time, there's a wonderfully
Italianate flexibility to the whole thing: inventorying the varieties
of articulation that Molinari-Pradelli draws from his by no means
second rate Italian radio orchestra would be a truly daunting task.
There is no conductor alive today who could produce anything like the
same results with, say, a powerfully efficient machine like the Met
orchestra that Levine has built. Molinari-Pradelli and every member
of his orchestra are alive to the music in all of its textural and
articulative variety: even the second half of the finale to Act II,
which can seem interminable in other hands, comes off effectively
here. Of course, these particular musicians don't deserve anything
like all of the credit: this performance is as much the product of a
marvelous performance tradition, one that is now virtually extinct, as
of these particular musicians who happen to embody it.
If you're familiar with Stich-Randall, Sciutti, Alva, and Bruscantini,
you'll know what to expect from them: perhaps none of them was
endowed with the most ravishingly beautiful voice imaginable, but they
all turn in extremely fine performances. The names of Gencer and
Petri may be less well known to the less opera-addicted among us.
Gencer was a contemporary of Maria Callas with similar virtues and
greater longevity as a singer who performed a repertory not dissimilar
to Callas's. Although she never made a commercial recording, she
appeared in countless performances of obscure Italian operas by
Monteverdi, Mayr, Spontini, Donizetti, etc., many of which have been
preserved in live recordings, earning Gencer the nickname "Queen of
the Pirates." With her ravishing floated high pianissimi and abuse of
the glottal stop, she sounded not unlike Montserrat Caballé: if
Caballé had the more beautiful instrument, Gencer was by far the more
intelligent and interesting singer and also the more scrupulous
musician. This recording captures her singing in very good form.
Mario Petri was a leading Italian baritone of the 1950's who made his
debut at La Scala in 1948 as Creon in Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, later
performing the same role in a surprisingly persuasive RAI broadcast
under Karajan. Petri was a magnificent Simon Boccanegra in the first
recording of Boccanegra, a Cetra recording from 1951 also with
Molinari-Pradelli. As Don Giovanni, he sounds perhaps a little less
mellifluous than Cesare Siepi but also a little steadier of tone. His
sound sometimes hardens a bit when he sings forte, but the sinister
suavity he brings to "La ci darem" and "Deh, vieni alla finestra" is
not to be believed.
I don't know whether this performance has been released in better
sound on another label, but the sound on Opera d'Oro is quite good,
and the voices in particular: the orchestra is a bit recessed, the
timpani making the dull thuds that timpani overload always provokes in
live recordings of this vintage.
I vaguely recall Simon Roberts writing about a DVD incarnation of this
performance at some point.
-david gable
Simon Roberts
david...@aol.com says...
[snip]
>I vaguely recall Simon Roberts writing about a DVD incarnation of this
>performance at some point.
Yes; I like it as much as you do (assuming the DVD is the same performance;
seems likely).
Simon
Apollo
Yes, this same performance is available in black and white on DVD at
vaimusic.com (VAI). The production is first rate as well.
jrs...@aol.com
I vaguely recall you wrote about this performance two years ago
saying,
"I'm about halfway through the RAI Don Giovanni, sound only, with
Stich-Randall, Gencer, Molinari-Pradelli et al. I'm a great admirer
of
La Gencer and Maestro Molinari-Pradelli, but this performance is not
what I had hoped it might be, that is, a nice Italianate performance
along the lines of M-P's Donizetti . . . or like Giulini's only with
more backbone. I'll post a little review of it when I've listened to
the whole thing."
I had sort of the same reaction you did, the first time I heard it--it
is good but not quite fulfilling the very high expectations. I'll have
to try it again. Perhaps I too will rave about it the second time
around.
--Jeff
david...@aol.com
> I had sort of the same reaction you did, the first time I heard it--it
> is good but not quite fulfilling the very high expectations. I'll have
> to try it again. Perhaps I too will rave about it the second time
> around.
This time I listened to the whole thing, score in hand, although I
will admit that I skipped the secco recitative and "Non mi dir." I
didn't even skip Zerlina's arias, which I also normally skip. The
biggest surprise was the relative security of the orchestra: a far
cry from the some of the formations Bruno Maderna has led in Mahler
symphonies.
-david gable
Richard Loeb
news:1185294808....@x35g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
--Jeff
Personally I find Giulinis EMI reading not only to have "backbone" but to be
a very dramatic, tense and heavily accented reading. Like all great opera
conductors he is very interested in how a section of the score should
"sound" vis a vis the dramatic situation on stage. He incisively
underlines every section to reflect the drama and in the CD incarnation
without the frequent side breaks one can really hear the cumulative force of
the reading inexorably building towards the final denoument. My favorite
studio recording of this work; though regarding conducting the similar
Fricsay is not far behind. Richard
Simon Roberts
david...@aol.com says...
>This time I listened to the whole thing, score in hand, although I
>will admit that I skipped the secco recitative and "Non mi dir." I
>didn't even skip Zerlina's arias, which I also normally skip.
I usually do too, but Sciutti is really good here, perhaps the best I've heard
from her. But do watch the video if you get the chance (Netflix has it); she's
marvelous to watch (which isn't to say the others aren't).
Simon
Andrew T. Kay
> This time I listened to the whole thing, score in hand, although I
> will admit that I skipped the secco recitative and "Non mi dir." I
> didn't even skip Zerlina's arias, which I also normally skip.
I always have felt I *should* like those more than I do. When I did
that traversal of four DON GIOVANNIs on DVD (Furtwaengler, HvK, and
Muti I and II), I did not skip anything, but her two arias tempted me
more than anything else. By the fourth performance, when "Batti,
batti" came around, I was all but urging Masetto to take her up on
it.
I like Donna Anna's "Non mi dir," though. Especially when the soprano
can sing it and isn't being undermined in some way by the conductor.
Todd K
david...@aol.com
> Personally I find Giulinis EMI reading not only to have "backbone" but to be
> a very dramatic, tense and heavily accented reading. Like all great opera
> conductors he is very interested in how a section of the score should
> "sound" vis a vis the dramatic situation on stage. He incisively
> underlines every section to reflect the drama and in the CD incarnation
> without the frequent side breaks one can really hear the cumulative force of
> the reading inexorably building towards the final denoument. My favorite
> studio recording of this work; though regarding conducting the similar
> Fricsay is not far behind. Richard
"Incisive" and "backbone" are metaphors that it would never occur to
me to apply to any Giulini performance, and a back to back comparison
of selected passages from Giulini's recording to many others I can
think of would surely lead the objective listener to describe the
other performance as more "incisive," which doesn't mean that you
wouldn't still prefer Giulini's to the other performances.
If I understand what you write here, you seem to feel that Giulini is
quasi-exceptional in "reflect[ing] the drama" in his performance. I
am skeptical that he is anything like exceptional in this regard, and
I'm incapable of hearing what you're getting at: in opera, the
dramatist is the composer, and even a conductor utterly indifferent to
the drama could give a great performance of the opera simply by
projecting the "drama" of the musical forms effectively. After all,
many purely instrumental pieces "inexorably [build] towards the final
denoument," and so forth. Nor do I think it would be possible for any
listener to determine through listening alone whether a conductor was
passionately interested in the drama onstage or indifferent to it. (I
have no doubt that conductors like Giulini and Molinari-Pradelli
who've spent a lot of time conducting in the pit of an opera house do
develop skills in coordinating the singing onstage and the playing in
the pit as well as all kinds of other skills valuable in the effective
performance of an opera, skills that conductors without this
experience wouldn't necessarily acquire.)
In any case, I applied the metaphor "backbone" specifically to
Molinari-Pradelli's projection of Mozart's rhythms, and it would be
easy to demonstrate exactly what I mean if I could post a couple of
phrases from his performance here. I don't know of any other recorded
performance where the syncopated rhythms in the accompaniment to Don
Giovanni's "Metà di voi" are as tightly projected as they are in M-P's
performance: it's the last thing I would ever have expected from a
performance by a RAI orchestra. The performance of "Metà di voi" is
symptomatic of what the whole performance is like, and the credit
clearly goes to Molinari-Pradelli.
-david gable