From the Sublime

...The second half of the concert took up tamer subjects, and the scheduled program came to a close with the gracious dancing measures of "Der Musen-sohn" ("Son of the Muses...

...John Brecknock's profuse ornamentation in the role of Don Ottavio hearkened back to the days when an eminent British conductor described a disc of Handel arias as "Mad Scenes from Messiah...

...True, the acoustics allow even the most delicate sounds to register up to the auditorium's highest reaches...

...It is difficult to summon up any singer today who could equal Fischer-Dieskau's achievement in these recitals...

...Perhaps performances of Winterreise ought to be strictly private affairs for the cognoscenti, and even for them only when they are in the proper frame of mind...

...Vocally, no one else was in her class...

...While not aspiring to the rigorous esthetic coherence of the second concert, Fischer-Dieskau created programs that were no less profound for being more accessible...

...Nevertheless, if I would not classify his instrument as first-rate, neither could I imagine calling it second-rate, for through this voice one of the four or five most complete musical intelligences of our time shares itself with the world...

...In the baroque and bel canto fields, Bonynge has long championed musicological accuracy, and to the extent that his artists' facility has permitted, he has encouraged them to embroider their lines freely within the period conventions...

...She recorded the role many years ago in a memorable performance under Carlo Maria Giulini (Angel 3605 D/L), and again, in less happy circumstances, under Bonynge (London OSA 1434...

...Among the hottest tickets of this season was the Metropolitan Opera's revival of Mozart's Don Giovanni, with Joan Sutherland as Donna Anna...

...Sutherland has not been heard in music worthy of the nobility of her voice in many seasons...

...None of the repertoire was new to these seasoned performers, yet their devoted attention to the composer's melodic eloquence and their fresh insight into his musical thought made their series a journey of discovery...

...BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH In March, Dietrich Fischer-Dies-kau, the foremost lieder singer of our age and most recorded artist in musical history, honored the 150th anniversary of the death of Franz Schubert with three all-Schubert recitals at Carnegie Hall...

...But in this respect, too, Bonynge disappointed...

...Bonynge could therefore have rendered a valuable service by demanding consistent execution from his cast...

...Although big-name artists regularly book Carnegie Hall for solo appearances, the huge space does not lend itself to the art of the lied...

...His embellishments ripple easily on the smooth surface of the superbly articulated phrases that his effortless breath control allows him to sustain...

...He can perform the fancy work he ambitiously demands of himself, but his voice is dry and unpleas-ing, and there is nothing musicianly about his singing at all...

...The most magnificent piece, however, was "Gruppe aus dem Tartarus" ("Group in Hell"), set to Schiller's description of the torments of the damned, who wait and labor through a roiling commotion of clouded harmonies but are excluded when eternity -figured in the race of pure major and minor chords up and down the keyboard-Shatters the reign of time...

...The public seems to hear much more of Schubert's cycle when they hear it in excerpt...

...The first and third recitals ranged freely in Schubert's inexhaustible song literature...

...To Mozart, the same general rules of ap-poggiatura and ornamentation apply -and are often ignored...

...And he seems determined to turn his talents to everything...

...Throughout his wide register, he maintains perfect control of dynamics, color and pitch...

...Other highlights included "Memnon," the song of the statue who greets the rising of the sun with song, and "Der Tod und das Madchen" ("Death and the Maiden"), the brief, haunting exchange between the terrified soul and her comforter...

...The lieder before intermission made up a gallery of antiquities and figures from myth as refracted by German romanticism...

...His vowels are so pure, his consonants so clear, that his words carry their phonetic value and their expression to the top balcony without distortion even when the songs are scaled to the closest circle of intimacy...

...No profound musical imagination, only scholarship and authority were required to make the evening an object lesson in correct Mozartean style...

...Fischer-Dieskau, the meticulous respecter of style that he is, never miscalculates in this fashion...

...Fischer-Dieskau traversed it with heroic concentration and the supplest art, but the piece is in its way as cruel an endurance test for the listeners as it is for the performers, and the Carnegie Hall audience, quickly numbed by the ceaseless gloom, pounced on the end of each song with almost vindictive fits of coughing...

...this simply is not the cornerstone of his technique...

...For all the genius and variety of Schubert's settings (which with the subtlest acuity evoke such different impressions as the chill of the traveler's frozen tears, the memory of breezes ruffling the branches of the linden tree, the flicker of the will-o'-the-wisp, the hollow tones of a broken hurdy-gurdy), the sequence is almost unbearably unified by cheerlessness, brooding and complaint...

...Still, if one recital had the edge over the others, it was the third...

...He is developing bad habits as a vocalist (back vowels) and as an actor (sign language), and young as he is, he has seen better days...

...The 24 poems of Wilhelm Mul-ler's text describe the solitary winter wanderings of a rejected lover who finds in every detail of his own person and of the landscape around him occasions for voicing his gnawing bitterness...

...Fischer-Dieskau's voice is not gorgeous...

...In the second, more various, part of the bill Fischer-Dieskau immediately set a lighter tone with the happy "Die Vogel" (whose chirruping mimicry of birds does not, in truth, greatly suit him), and he concluded the evening's program with the proud affirmation of poetic creativity, "Aus Heliopolis...

...for Mozart, he is unacceptable...

...Sutherland has long refused to perform with anyone except her husband, Richard Bonynge, in the pit...

...then the baritone returned, as he had in the initial recital, to prolong the pleasure of his company with no fewer than six encores...

...The syncopation in the opening four bars went down the drain, and the solemn pomp of the descending chromatic scale (bars 5-11) passed unnoticed...

...So it is a pleasure to report that her Donna Anna displayed her in admirable form...

...Lackluster conducting notwithstanding, the performance as a whole could have had its interest...

...To all this add keen understanding, deep sympathy with his material and a universal love of music that irradiate whatever he turns his talents to...

...The cheerful Huguette Tourangeau was entrusted with the delicious role of the peasant girl Zerlina...

...Julia Varady took the part of Donna Elvira, the forsaken mistress who claims Don Giovanni as her husband...

...Unfortunately, by bar 27 of the overture, at the very latest, it was obvious that from the standpoint of high musical and poetic drama, there was not much to be expected...

...A great conductor can make of this passage a hair-raising voyage back and forth and back and forth through the veil of mortality...

...it cannot give the sheer sensuous pleasure many lesser artists parlay into valuable properties...

...Fischer-Dieskau began with "Prometheus," the famous setting of Goethe's monologue, which juxtaposes accents of commanding defiance with strains of aching nostalgia...

...Indeed, not five years ago, he was an elegant Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan...

...Sutherland onstage with her looks like a Titaness beside a little girl, and Varady made a touching contrast...

...Styles came and went...

...She managed to sound like a provincial Carmen...

...For the rather shallow repertoire they have specialized in, he has not proved entirely ineffective...

...She embellished decorously, phrased with majesty and soared through the top line of the ensembles with gleaming ease...

...Singers who have the amplitude tend to compensate for the setting by increasing their volume, thereby approximating considerably broader vocal gestures of operatic delivery...

...Jorg Demus, a long-time colleague of the baritone, assisted at the keyboard...

...it was a disgrace...

...Some of the singers embellished lavishly, others not at all...

...At bar 23, the flutes join the first violins in parallel octaves in a four-fold sequence of scales that climb and reverse, music that later in the opera is associated with the chilly hand of death...

...Some descending mordents in his first aria seemed especially ill-advised...

...It isn't that he lacks the power for ringing declamation when the occasion warrants...

...Bonynge just played the scales that brought him to the aforementioned bar 27, and by that point it seemed masochistic to pay very close attention to the details of his miserable demystification...

...James Morris, as the paradigmatic seducer himself, was too narcissistic, impossible as that may sound...

...The gravest of the concerts was the second, wholly given over to the song cycle Die Winterreise, played without intermission and followed by no encores...

...Returning to this major role after an interruption of several years, she showed the vocal freedom of old and a new dramatic fire...

...Appoggiature were sung or they were not sung...

...With her apparent fragility, her poignant acting (especially the gestures of her pitiful, helpless hands), and her lovely musicality, her portrayal was one to cherish...

...but lieder depend on nuances of phrase and inflection that almost no one can hope to project through the whole house...

...The first half of the opening concert, for instance, centered on longing for death, yet in "Abendbilder" ("Evening Pictures") the forbidding twilit graveyard is transformed by the nightingale, the starlight and the flooding moonshine into an image of confidence in the resurrection...

...But in the more ornate fireworks of a role that has been described as a steeplechase, she dropped her words completely and sang a vocalise...

...his choices maintained a thematic unity within a multiplicity of moods...