Beyond this recording, I am unfamiliar with Salvatore Puma, the Osaka. He is exactly the sort of “competent, solid” tenor I referred to earlier, with a bright, sturdy voice that holds up well against the overloaded tessitura until he hits his limit in the heavy-breathing protestations of Osaka’s return at the end of Act 2. It’s just that there is not enough technical flexibility or tonal blandishment to salvage the part from itself. The Kyoto is Saturno Meletti, an accomplished character baritone well known to collectors of Cetra complete operas of the 1940s and ’50s, in roles as prominent as Ford, Melitone, and the Rabbi David (L’amico Fritz). Without inviting “luxury casting” comparison to Giuseppe de Luca (who succeeded Scotti in this role at the Met), he is right on Kyoto’s case, and extracts as much from the writing as we have any right to expect. And another Cetra veteran, the bass Giulio Neri (Mefistofele, the Don Carlo Inquisitor, et al.), sings (and speaks) Il Cieco. In music calling for a rolling legato line or shapely molding of phrase, he would not be a likely choice. But the voice was of major calibre and Hagen-like blackness, and here he can use it with unusual dynamic restraint and simplicity. His quiet opening-scene dialogue (the sung portion) is beautiful. (Isn’t it rather harsh, by the way, to include Il Cieco among the Egoisms? Granted, he shouldn’t fling mud. But after all, he’s a completely dependent, blind old man, and Obamacare isn’t among the legendary entitlements.) In Act 3, the tenor Mario Carlin sings the Ragpicker’s haunting stanzas with extraordinary beauty.
The conducting (Angelo Questa), orchestral playing, and choral singing are all in the upper tier of these RAI performances of the time, and the sonics, an occasional harshness in the strings and an odd change in the acoustic near the end of Act 2 apart, are also above average for ’50s broadcast mono. Besides the Adriana performance, Immortal Performance’s generous package includes extensive Olivero bonus material from both earlier and later, and two booklets with synopses and recording notes by Richard Caniell, a reminiscence of Cilea by Olivero, and appreciative essays on the singer by Caniell and Stephen Hastings.
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My Zandonai hopes rested on Myto’s issue of the famous 1959 La Scala production of Francesca da Rimini. This is again Olivero in a part she triumphed in, together with Mario del Monaco, conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni, arguably the foremost latterday interpreter of the verismo repertory. But the hopes were quickly dashed. The thin, noisy sound quality is close to unlistenable, and after two acts of Del Monaco at his late-prime steeliest and Olivero flailing away amid the hyperbolic bombast of Act 2, I gave up on the project and returned to the late scenes of the Cetra performance with Caniglia, Prandelli, and Tagliabue (and Carlin again, as Maletstino) under Antonio Guarnieri, to remind myself that there is some captivating, singable music in this score. So Zandonai will have to wait, and perhaps more Mascagni, too—the Cetra LPs of Il Piccolo Marat (1962, with Zeani, Rossi-Lemeni, et al.) sit demurely in a corner, biding their time.
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As I predicted at the beginning of my last post, Sorry: Money Again, initial page view numbers fell quite drastically from those of the preceding piece on Die Meistersinger. However, I was heartened by its staying power, which, relative to those first numbers, was healthier than the average. I was also encouraged by the thoughtfulness of response, ranging from rather exasperated (along the lines of “Why do people keep professing their love for the arts while refusing to look at how they might be paid for?”) to fed up (one couple in their late seventies announced their pending removal to France, where the state provides more than ten times the American appropriation for a far smaller population), to the valid observation that with certain kinds of musical organizations (seldom including an opera company, I should guess) that derive most or all of their earned income through presentation fees or sponsored appearances, a requirement of 30% of the total budget in ticket sales as a pre-requisite for funding consideration would be impossible to meet. (The answer is that the presentation fees would be considered the equivalent of box office income.)