(Pic: Renee Fleming and Lawrence Brownlee In “Armida”)Column by William Charlton-Perkins presented by kind permission of The Mercury newspaper.
This column is dedicated to my friend, the singer Robert Petersen, whose death in a car crash this month has left our music fraternity bereft and stunned. Last Friday’s (May 21) memorial service in the Durban City Hall, organised by the KZN Philharmonic, was a deeply moving, hugely uplifting occasion. Such was Robert’s enormous standing that a host of musical luminaries, professional choirs and children’s choristers banded together from far and wide to sing and play for him, and pay tribute to his life and the memory of a man who was unfailingly kind, gentle, loving and brave.
For me, listening to music with Robert was always a joyful experience. Pure quality time, filled with moments of glee, exhilaration and mutual delight. A most cherished experience was listening to Rossini’s Armida with him, shortly after its CD release in 1994 on the Sony Classics label. Recorded live at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro in Italy, it launched Renée Fleming’s recording career. Both the work and the singer remained personal favourites of ours. We’d planned to see the Met’s new production together when it hit our local movie circuit this month end. Its long-awaited HD screening opens on May 28 at Cinema Nouveau.
One of many settings of Torquato Tasso’s epic, Gerusalemme liberate, the plot of Rossini’s opera devolves around the beguiling sorceress of its title, who entices a string of lovers onto her enchanted island. Rossini’s splendid take on the classic Armida and Rinaldo legend was first performed at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples on 11 November 1817. It was the second of eight masterpieces he created for the illustrious Neapolitan house’s virtuosi, headed by the Spanish soprano, Isabella Colbran, who became the composer’s muse and his wife.
Scored for one soprano, six tenors, two basses, chorus and orchestra, the opera makes elaborate demands on its singers and orchestral players. Its title role is one of the longest and most demanding Rossini wrote. Its most famous number is the soprano show-stopper, D'amore al dolce impero, a dazzling set of variations near the start of Act 2. Other musical highpoints are the ravishingly beautiful duets between Armida and Rinaldo, her latest conquest, the gorgeous ballet in Act 2, and the soprano’s cataclysmic Act 3 finale. Not to mention its various tenor solos, duets, quartet and ensembles, each more astonishing the last.
I could only catch the first act and the start of the second act during the press preview last week. But with Fleming in typically sumptuous voice, a glinting, sly seductress, I shall certainly keep faith with my friend, and be back for the rest the Met’s staging. Heading the coterie of tenors who ring out stratospheric high notes and combative roulades, Lawrence Brownlee delivers a dashing Rinaldo, while our own Kobie van Rensburg more than holds his own against his accomplished colleagues. - William Charlton-Perkins
Posts
