On Tuesday, March 19, 2019 at 9:22:17 PM UTC-7, ...@gmail.com wrote:
> (from Opera News):
>
> In 1961, Leontyne Price recorded her greatest stage triumph, Aida. Nine
> years later, she recorded it again. LEIGHTON KERNER argues that neither
> recording truly captured Price's opera-house magic
>
> Certain facts of life can be quite discouraging. One such fact for
> opera-lovers is that no singing voice, no matter how great, can be
> captured accurately on recordings. One can hear the difference of
> voices and singing methods between Callas and Tebaldi, Risë Stevens
> and Marian Anderson, Tucker and Gedda, Warren and Bastianini, Siepi and
> Christoff, but one cannot hear how each of these singers made a
> particular theater's walls vibrate in unique ways. If you've heard New
> York City Opera bass Norman Treigle only on records, you've never heard
> all of him. The engineers presented a mere shadow of his chameleonic
> Boito Mefistofele and missed much of the elegant authority of his
> Handel Giulio Cesare, which worked well onstage despite editorial
> butchery and vocal miscasting (alto or countertenor music sunk down to
> bass). Recordings registered about half the organ-diapason that
> baritone Leonard Warren could bestow on Verdi. And compared with what
> even the pre-Antony and Cleopatra Leontyne Price could achieve with
> Verdi in the opera home, some of her records insult her.
>
> One cannot in all honesty, however, blame the Price problem entirely on
> the recording process. In her best years, her voice -- a generous lyric
> soprano, but not a spinto, as The New Grove Dictionary of Opera
> contends (she never really pushed it) -- wasn't truly phonogenic. Much
> of her voice's early beauty lay in the air that its well-controlled and
> varied power set in vibration. Her first Met performances, in 1961's Il
> Trovatore, gave a vivid example: the climactic crests of Leonora's Act
> IV aria, "D'amor sull'ali rosee." Even more of a thrill came soon
> thereafter, with her first Met Aida. The softly radiant high C and A in
> the closing page of "O patria mia" were never again equaled by Price or
> by anyone else I've ever heard.
>
> The difference between Price at her best in an opera house or on a
> concert stage and the lady on her finest recordings lay, it seems, in
> that lack of enhancing air-space, something that the engineers are
> powerless to supply. This article results partly from my memory of her
> live performances early, then mid-career and late, coupled with recent
> hearings of CD reissues of her two recorded Aidas. The first was
> recorded in 1961, when Price was thirty-four, at the Rome Opera House,
> with Georg Solti conducting that theater's chorus and orchestra and a
> cast that featured Rim Gorr, Jon Vickers, Giorgio Tozzi and Robert
> Merrill. The second was made in London in 1970, with Erich Leinsdorf
> conducting Grace Bumbry as Amneris, Plácido Domingo as Radamès,
> Ruggero Raimondi as Ramfis, Sherrill Milnes as Amonasro, the John Aldis
> Choir and the London Symphony. And perhaps just to help even the
> playing field, the legendary Richard Mohr produced both.
>
> Between 1961 and 1970 came the big bump on Price's career-road: the
> 1966 Antony and Cleopatra, which inaugurated and nearly crippled the
> Met's new Lincoln Center supermarket (thanks to director and designer
> Franco Zeffirelli's Egyptological ambitions). More to the musical
> point, Samuel Barber told people he had composed Cleopatra's role for
> Price's Carmen voice. Having heard that rather foggy Bizet recording,
> I'm sure Graham Greene's Harry Lime would have called Barber's decision
> "unwise, Sam, unwise."
>
> In view of what both Carmen and Cleopatra did to Price, it seemed easy
> to predict how the two Aida CDs would compare, especially considering
> how closely the earlier one followed that glorious first Met Aida. But
> hold your bets. Without the advantage of a big auditorium, in which the
> younger Price thrived, the Solti recording almost never finds her free
> of throatiness or slight huskiness, no matter how wonderfully she
> arches her phrases and how crisply she utters what Verdi called his
> parole sceniche. Then again, the 1970 discs still pour lots of vocal
> pea soup but retain some bright phrases from Price, yet with too much
> unsteadiness of line.
>
> A scene-by-scene comparison of the two Price performances is useful.
> The first scene's trio among the anguished Aida, the jealous Amneris
> and the defensive Radamès is Aida's entrance into the opera. In 1961,
> Price sang about half as throatily as in 1970, but both sets reveal her
> overriding vocal line as properly steady. The steadiness continues in
> both recordings during Aida's brief but overwrought interjections of
> comment during the big ensemble that follows. With the "Ritorna
> vincitor.... Numi, pietà" monologue that ends the long scene, however,
> vocal differences become more marked. Right at the beginning, the
> smoothness of 1961 wavers with lack of breath-support in 1970. Several
> more incidences of deteriorated breath-control can be heard in the
> scene's middle section; the occasional brightness of single notes in
> the same portion and in the concluding "Numi, pietà" that shows up in
> the later performance is twice as bright in the earlier one.
>
> Aida's next scene (Act II, Scene 1) is mainly a duet in which Amneris
> tricks Aida into admitting she loves Radamès, the scene ending with
> Aida's reprising an abridged "Numi, pietà." In the adagio F-minor
> section of the duet ("Ah! pietà ti prendi"), after Aida has stopped
> herself from defying Amneris as a disguised princess of equal rank, the
> 1961 Price has a fine arsenal of vocal detail (grace notes, smooth
> phrasing, and so on). But in 1970, breath-support once again keeps
> crumbling away in too many long phrases -- except one that soars
> wonderfully -- and leaves several groups of delicately graced details
> as tiny, isolated and not very useful victories.
>
> In both performances, the ensuing triumph scene gives Our Lady of the
> Fog some sunny relief. This is particularly true in the long, glorious
> "Ma tu, Re" ensemble, where Price colors a brief but lovely solo
> cadenza, and where the biggest climaxes buoy her up to high B-flats and
> a quite radiant high C.
>
> But then comes Act III -- the Nile scene -- less than a year but
> several weather-changes from that incredible experience when Price
> first sang the scene (and the opera) at the Met, in February 1961. On
> both recordings, the Egyptian riverbank has acquired Washington, D.C.'s
> Foggy Bottom for Our Lady's voice, all the more regrettably in the 1970
> version. The earlier recording, however, even with the huskiness, is
> still generous in the musical detail of the previous Met performance.
> "O patria mia" -- recitative and that whole originally constructed aria
> -- still has those softly sustained phrases, the double grace notes,
> the gentle stresses, that separate the great Aidas fom their abundant
> inferiors. The later recorded "O patria mia" finds Price to be a
> surrogate for those inferiors, with that unsteady breath-support more
> conspicuous than ever. Yes, there are also those isolated specks of
> beauty, including the concluding pianissimo rise to high A, but there
> is not enough to save the whole number.
>
> Aida's next scene, with Amonasro, sustains frequent breath letdowns in
> 1970 that didn't exist in 1961. At some point between the two
> performances, Price lost that chilling bar of crisp chest-tone at the
> point where she tells Daddy she'll die after just one hour of erotic
> joy with Radamès.
>
> Right through her duet with Radamès and their final scene in the tomb,
> the same basic situation persists for Price: reliability of long
> phrases in 1961, frequent fluttering of fragmented lines in 1970, with
> brief, better focused exceptions in the latter. In fact, when Verdi
> calls for dolce, it often helps her sustain especially soft notes,
> huskiness or no, in both performances and regardless of sostenuto
> troubles in 1970.
>
> What you hear on both Aida recordings, but especially the later one, is
> this buzz, a kind of husky, foggy quality that was not present in live
> performance. Those who were not inside the Metropolitan Opera House in
> 1961 will never have the chance to experience that breathtaking purity
> of sound, the golden quality of Price's voice at its peak.
>
> By Leighton Kerner
>
>
> LEIGHTON KERNER, a freelance writer based in New York, is the former
> classical-music critic of The Village Voice.