View: Next message | Previous message Next in topic | Previous in topic Next by same author | Previous by same author Previous page (July 1999, week 1) | Back to main OPERA-L page Join or leave OPERA-L Reply | Post a new message Search Options: Chronologically | Most recent first Proportional font | Non-proportional font ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 01:11:08 +0000 Reply-To: "H.E.Elsom" Sender: Discussion of opera and related issues From: "H.E.Elsom" Subject: Sara Mingardo/Rinaldo Alessandrini, St James's, 1Jul99 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" The press publicity for this recital of songs by Monteverdi, Mozart and Schubert suggests that Sara Mingardo is the baroque equivalent of Cecilia Bartoli. They're both Italian mezzos, loosely speaking, with first-rate comic stage skills. (Mingardo was a funny, naughty Quickly in Gardiner's Falstaff last year.) But I think it ends there. For a start, Mingardo doesn't have a global publicity machine -- St James' was half empty -- and I'm not absolutely sure that's she's cut out to sing Handel, though Bartoli is. I'd like to be wrong about that, of course. Mingardo is anything but cute or pert. She has the understated and extremely expensive style of, say, the director-general of an Italian television station. Though in her designer specs she also has a touch of a professor of astrophysics in a disaster movie. But while Mingardo's performance is classy, it's certainly not understated. Her voice is rich and warm, but not hefty enough to be a proper contralto, in spite of her PR's web page. It's more like a velvety version of Katarina Karneus'. And Mingardo's performance in the Monteverdi first part was one about which I'll probably be telling people I was there for years. The set consisted of five showpiece arias, starting with Ariadne's lament. (This was a bit like Lorraine Hunt starting her Wigmore Hall recital last year with Scherza infida.) Mingardo delivered every detail of the rhetoric of the text (courtesy mainly of Catullus), but with a ferocious intensity that should have been difficult to top. She turned a page so vehemently that she nearly pulled her copy off the stand. La lettera amoroso (love from Ovid) is a much finer grained work in its text and music, but it is also a desperate plea to a distant beloved. A letter of course is at least nominally intended to be read by its addressee, so the texture of the emotions involved is subtly but substantially different. (I didn't realise that letters and arias or scenas were associated so soon, though Ovid's Amores makes it inevitable anyway.) Mingardo again got the details impeccably, with all the complexities of expression in the play of fire and ice, ecstasy and despair. She followed with a despairing messenger's narrative from Orfeo, and two more abandoned queens, Ottavia's Disprezzata regine from Poppea and Penelope's Di misera regina from Ulysses. It would have been a bit much if it hadn't been so glorious. The short section of ecstatic melody towards the end of Penelope's aria was magical, and the final repetition of Torna Ulisse was unbearable, even though you knew he would. Strangely, Mingardo stuck to her copy most of the time, even though she clearly knew the arias well enough to act with total commitment. She's down to sing a role in Poppea, presumably Ottavia, in Florence. I hope we see it in London. The second part of the programme was an inevitable comedown. Mingardo sang a set of Mozart songs neatly, with a sense of insecurity and quite a few misplaced umlauts. She dealt effectively with the repeated refrain -- oh my God she's going to forget me -- of Leid der Trennung, adding a greater degree of anguish every time. And Als Luise die Briefe ihres ungetreuen Liebhabers verbrannte was a nice reprise of the themes of the Monteverdi Lettera amorosa. (Somehow deleting the old email isn't the same.) There was a bit more to the set of Schubert standards, beginning with a luscious An die Musik and ending with a sensuous Ganymed. But the best bit of the second part was the pair of birds who sang a brief duet in the dying notes of Du bist die Ruh. Rinaldo Alessandrini was a fine accompanist, on harpsichord for Monteverdi and fortepiano for Mozart and Schubert. He also played a piece by Frescobaldi in the first part, and Mozart's Fantasia in D minor in the second part. The latter got enthusiastic applause. Because he played with delightful delicacy and style, of course, not because it's the theme music from Lovejoy. There were no encores. Mingardo came out to take bows without her specs on. It would have been nice if she'd had When I am laid in grave ready, or something short and funny. Regards, Helen - H.E. Elsom he@helsom.demon.co.uk http://www.helsom.demon.co.uk/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to: Top of message | Previous page | Main OPERA-L page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to the LISTSERV home page at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU.