Recording Review: William Lewis (Pollux) and Michael Hendrick (Merkur) are assets to the performance.
Flanigan, Saffer, Mesic, Jennings, Phillips, Canis; Coleman-Wright, H. Smith, W Lewis, Hendrick; American Symphony Orchestra and Concert Chorale of New York, Botstein. Notes, libretto and translation. Telarc CD-80570 (3)
If this extraordinary recording of Strauss’s undervalued Die Liebe der Danae does not jolt opera companies into staging the work, the world will be a poorer place. Until now, the only complete Danae on disc was a radio broadcast of its official premiere, in 1952 at Salzburg, an uneven performance afflicted by muffled sound. In 1982, Santa Fe Opera gave what was billed as the “first professional performance in America”; Santa Fe repeated the opera in 1985, but major companies in the U.S. have been reluctant to follow.
As conductor Leon Botstein writes in the accompanying booklet to this enchanting Danae, “The music in this opera is not the music of a contented craftsman, relying on the conventions he himself helped to create….
Audiences that have embraced the music of Philip Glass, John Adams, Arvo Part, David Del Tredici, John Corigliano, and an even younger generation of American composers, will find old Strauss remarkably up to date.”
“Old Strauss” was in his mid-seventies when he began work on Dame, shortly after the 1938 premiere of Daphne. He assumed that Danae would be his last opera (though, fortunately, Capriccio followed), and much of its third act is infused with a poignant sense of resignation and farewell that seems to reflect Strauss’s own feelings. The orchestration was completed in 1940, but the composer decreed that the Danae premiere would not take place until two years after the end of the war. It was Clemens Krauss, conductor of the premiere of Capriccio in 1942, who convinced the composer to allow Dame to be given during the 1944 Salzburg Festival, though it got only as far as the dress rehearsal before it was canceled due to Goebbels declaration of “total war.” Krauss’s wife, the Romanian soprano Viorica Ursuleac, creator of Strauss’s Arabella, Countess Madeleine (Capriccio) and Maria (Friedenstag), was Danae at the opera’s “unofficial premiere”/dress rehearsal. Before his death, Strauss promised the role of Danae to Anne(ies Kupper, who sang the official premiere in 1952 under Krauss’s direction.
The libretto by Joseph Gregor (based on an earlier idea by Hugo von Hofmannsthal) combines the myth of Jupiter visiting Danae as a shower of gold with the story of King Midas’s golden touch. In the opera, Danae eventually chooses true love with Midas, who has been returned to his original status as a poor donkey driver, over a life of luxury with Jupiter. Though some of the music in Acts I and II is uneven in quality, on this occasion – a live concert performance in New York’s Avery Fisher Hall on January 16, 2000 – it abounds in beguiling melodies, rollicking choruses, glittering orchestration and ravishing duets, its final act brimming with genuine pathos and tenderness while still managing to end on a happy note.
Under Botstein’s impassioned direction, there is a marvelous, seductive sweep to the opera, its momentum building securely to the great final scene. Lauren Flanigan is sensational in the taxing role of Dance, pouring out one shimmering phrase after another and sounding as if she had been born to sing Strauss. The role of Jupiter is, if possible, even more demanding, since it requires a helden– baritone of Wotan proportions, but one who also can negotiate the part’s extremely high tessitura. (At Dance’s premiere, Paul Schoeffler sang a transposed vocal line that avoided much of the parts top.) Here, Peter Coleman– Wright, who performed Jupiter for Garsington Opera in 1999, sings the part as Strauss wrote it, an extraordinary feat. He has a pleasant lyric baritone, which he uses with considerable artistry, but on this occasion much of the authoritative presence, the requisite majesty of Jupiter, is missing.
Midas is another of Strauss’s high-flying, heroic tenor parts – it has numerous high B-naturals and a sustained high C-sharp. Hugh Smith copes valiantly but often sounds uncomfortable when the vocal line rises above the staff William Lewis (Pollux) and Michael Hendrick (Merkur) are assets to the performance, as are Lisa Saffer (Xanthe) and Tamara Mesic, Jane Jennings, Mary Phillips and Elisabeth Canis as the Four Queens. The American Symphony Orchestra plays admirably.
Unfortunately, the English version of the libretto included with this recording is extraordinarily slangy. Translating “Der Konig, wo? Wo birgt sich Pollux?” as “Where’s that king of yours called Pollux? Where’s he hiding out from us this time?” smacks of condescension.
PAUL THOMASON
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-73389112.html
by Paul Thomason
Opera News