The Tenor's Reach
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music THE TENOR'S REACH by m. anatole gurewitsch T enors are much maligned. They have resonance, it is said, where their brains should be. Yet a real artist needs more than a range of notes...
...Vickers, slated for the role in London, cancelled, issuing a public statement to the effect that he had been unable to find any way of connecting with the part, vocally or dramatically...
...Wechsler lent the second act the full candlepower of festivity, but Schneider-Siemssen's castle hall had a merely conventional kind of grandeur and authority that did not equal the striking visual aptness of his other scenes...
...The band of pilgrims he joins returns home without him in Act III, and Elisabeth, who has consumed her days in prayer, quietly departs the earth...
...And yet, for all its variety, his portrayal shows no sign of calculation, no empty striving for effect...
...Her diction, though, was unfathomable...
...4?The Inextinguishable" ?is scheduled for April 19-20...
...And the part is long...
...Two high points stood out...
...still, it is a far cry from the French and Italian parts on which he has built an enduring career...
...At the Metropolitan Opera, James McCracken appeared in Tannhauser—his initial excursion into the Wagnerian repertoire—and Jon Vickers returned to play the Moor in Verdi's Otello...
...In "Nobody know the trouble I see," where the tenor sings solo against the full chorus, Stevenson's well-focused mezzoforte, with consonants so crisp his lines sounded almost staccato, seemed to collect and carry the song's entire weight of meaning...
...Yet a real artist needs more than a range of notes to flourish...
...The Franco Zeffirelli production, despite going through crucial changes in the musical forces, has held out superbly for many Met seasons...
...Vickers' gorgeous periods, sculpted with the highest musical refinement, serve a tragic impersonation of painful immediacy, of almost seraphic truth...
...In the complaint "I have no money" (set as a colossally amplified music-hall tango) Stevenson's voice rose with stalwart rhythmic force...
...When the minstrel finally does appear, he is spurned, embittered, alone, and hell-bent on rejoining Venus...
...The final program, featuring Nielsen's Symphony No...
...Of all the operas based on Shakespearean tragedy, Otello is the only one I know that attains a poetic and dramatic magnificence equal to that of its source...
...Although the music never climbs to the top Cs so beloved and so indispensable in the dramatic Italian repertoire, the tessitura is wickedly high, hovering above the staff for pages and calling for a steady series of powerful A naturals...
...Whatever its qualities, Ozawa's reading was hard to attend to in the sweltering, endlessly echoing vault...
...Whenever Stevenson sang, in fact, A Child of Our Time was momentarily every bit as significant as Tippett intended...
...Fernando de Lucia, Lauritz Melchior, Tito Schipa, John McCor-mack, Aksel Schiotz—all had intelligence of a special kind...
...His voice, while not lush, has a very pleasing true projection...
...This season has brought a hokey concert version of Berlioz' Beatrice et Benedict under Music Director Seiji Ozawa, remarkable for Frederica von Stade's zest and warmth as Beatrice and for the bejew-eled orchestral playing in the sublime Nocturne at the close of Act I. Two nights later, Ozawa led the Symphony and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus through the German Requiem of Brahms at the Church of Saint Paul the Apostle...
...for the strains of the lover, tenderness...
...Pilgrims hasten to his side, the papal staff in hand...
...For the declamations of the general, he has command...
...His wizardry transformed the first act vista of a glowing morning in early spring, with the night mists just burned off, into the third act prospect of an autumn twilight, with mists slowly gathering as the dark descended...
...it is green with new foliage in token of God's forgiveness...
...If conductor James Levine could not make the overture sing with the greatest instrumental ex-pansiveness, he did maintain a driving dramatic pulse and a fine sense of Wagnerian scale...
...Cornell MacNeiPs Iago—a dramatically monotonous and vocally undernourished affair—could not provide the proper foil to Vickers in their electrifying duets...
...A ?_ % lthough the Boston Symphony's New York series can give no more than the slightest glimpse of the orchestra's work at home in the Hub, it is well chosen both to show off the BSO at its best and to enhance New York's musical life...
...The Tippett was another matter...
...Then, in the tournament of song in Act II, he effectively repudiates the saintly Elisabeth (who has languished for him during his mysterious absence), interrupting his friend Wolfram's praise of chastity with a hymn to Venus and a confession that he has dwelled in her forbidden domain...
...Unfortunately, its poetic language plasters innumerable incompatible sources together in a smeary paste of mock-King James Version...
...Tannhauser is not McCracken's first German effort—he sang a shattering Florestan in Fidelio some years back...
...Tippett's instrumental writing has moments of extraordinary expressivity...
...Tannhduser, out of the Met repertoire for years, might not have been heard this season if McCracken had not taken up the challenge of singing the title role...
...His pliant, manly tenor has the heroic mettle the part requires, and he wields it with dramatic mastery...
...The production as a whole was on a very high level...
...The look of the opera was immensely enhanced by Gil Wechsler's lighting design...
...Bernd Weikl, as Wolfram, was disappointing in his prosaic address to the evening star, all the more so because before this lapse and after he acquitted himself with genuine distinction...
...The most powerful passages are five monumental choral arrangements of Negro spirituals...
...I know the Otello of Jon Vickers well from records, and this year I caught up with his live performance on the stage of the Met...
...New York has been hearing profoundly affecting performances by tenors in recent weeks...
...His assumption of the role was an artistic gamble that triumphantly paid off...
...The Mozart, dispatched in a businesslike manner, was of no deep interest...
...But Katia Ricciarelli made a lovely Desdemona, rising easily to the crest of her sweeping, noble phrases, and matched Vickers, notably in the love duet that closes the first act, with beautiful, unstudied candor...
...Tannhausers are understandably in short supply...
...36) and Tippett's A Child of Our Time...
...Stirring deep emotions through song is a gift, a craft and a science...
...He dies at her funeral bier...
...her singing had great poignancy, especially in the third act's limpid prayer...
...A Child of Our Time is a work of unflagging high-mindedness and patchy artistic inspiration...
...The three tenors have resonance, and it is not where their brains should be...
...Two worlds beckon, and he rejects both...
...The name of Elisabeth, however, rescues him from renewed perdition...
...For the third New York concert, Principal Guest Conductor Colin Davis offered Mozart's "Linz" Symphony (No...
...After Elisabeth's intercession quells the Thuringian court's murderous fury against Tannhauser, he heads for Rome, extravagant in his contrition, to beg forgiveness at the feet of the Holy Father...
...At Carnegie Hall, Alexander Stevenson sang the tenor part in the first professional New York performance of Michael Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time (composed 1939-42...
...Only the second section ("Denn alles Leben"), with its majestic, relentless progressions and its dynamic sublimity, left any lasting impression...
...Emotionally, Tannhauser's fate is hard to make real...
...He was not replaced...
...in the rapturous duet with Elisabeth in Act II, and the exhilarating folly of the hymn to Venus, he blasted out with a flaming radiance...
...He confirmed what can be surmised from the recordings: that he is an Otello of insight, power and harrowing intensity...
...Grace Bumbry made an alluring Venus, vocalizing brilliantly and exhibiting a long, shapely thigh...
...His music for chorus and the four soloists, on the other hand, often ignores the verbal meanings, and again and again snaps and sputters over the metric blunders and general hideous-ness of the text...
...Otto Schenk's direction made the action unfold lucidly, and the cast comported themselves with a strong feeling of purpose...
...In Act I, he repudiates Venus, whose embraces he has long enjoyed in the subterranean grottos where the goddess, banished by the triumph of the Christian faith, continues to hold her ancient court of love...
...Torn between love sacred and love profane, Tannhauser's dilemma is simple, even schematic, yet not immediately plausible...
...Giinther Schneider-Siemssen's sets and projections (in the representational mode now regaining favor after the drab austerities of the New Bayreuth style that dominated the '50s and '60s) conjured up a sensuous, reptilian grotto for Venus and a landscape of serene spaciousness for Thuringia...
...for the tortured husband's jealous outbursts, piercing agony...
...Tannhauser's role, composed of torment, frenzy, quarrelsomeness, and impatience, is hard to rescue from self-pity and stridency, but McCrack-en's portrayal was marked throughout by a superb eloquence...
...In a parable of mankind's history of strife and oppression, it universalizes the persecution of the Jews in Germany, locating the demons within the human soul...
...Teresa Kubiak, looking like a ship under full sail in the state gowns of Act II, became a moving figure of mercy in the simpler robe of Act III...
...He skillfully shaded his handsome, vibrant sound to the accents of heartache and depression in the opening and closing acts...
...Tippett never cheapens their stark dignity by fancification...
...First heard under Karl Bohm, whose sense of the Verdian style seemed somewhat crude, it was soon taken over by Levine, who detonates the explosions with bone-rattling frenzy and tames his passion for a richly lyric reading of the gentler passages...
...Alexander Stevenson, who has the pampered appearance of a latter-day Caravaggio dressed in the suit of a maitre d', sang the part of the boy who suffers the wrath and scorn of the world (the Child of Our Time) with understated sincerity, conveying innocence, resolve, powerlessness, and hope—and avoiding self-dramatization...
...Whether he was imprecating Venus to let him return, with his mortal heart, to the world of nature, growth and change, or giving the ghastly account of his humiliation in Rome, McCracken's vocal conviction made his longings and frustrations genuine...
Vol. 61 • March 1978 • No. 6
