(New-generation opera stars Michael Spyres
and Joyce El-Khouri have earned wide praise for their debut recital albums,
released by Opera Rara)
CDs to spice up friends’
classical collections
With the festive season upon us, it’s time for some
highly prized CD recommendations as suggested gifts for music-lovers. Thanks to
the current vicissitudes of our South African postal service, I finally got to
sample two remarkable new Opera Rara albums this week that were released in the
UK back in September. Titled Espoir and Écho, these two companion
discs mark the debut recital albums respectively of two widely-admired young
international stars, the maverick American tenor, Michael Spyres, and the
magnificent Lebanese-Canadian soprano, Joyce El-Khoury.
The pair sang the romantic leads in Opera Rara’s
prize-winning 2014 recording of Donizetti’s four-act French grand opera, Les
Martyrs, conducted by Sir Mark Elder (reviewed in this column), and they
are scheduled to team up again in another Donizetti rarity, L'Ange de Nisida,
to be recorded by Opera Rara in July next year, also under Elder’s baton.
Both Espoir and Écho offer superbly curated
programmes of mainly French repertoire, rarely heard these days, from the 1830s
and 40s. Each disc celebrates a trail-blazing singer of the period. Spyres, who
has wowed audiences in recent years with the superlative extended top range of
his exciting tenor voice, has dedicated his disc to the memory of the legendary
Gilbert-Louis Duprez (1806 – 1896).
It was Duprez who re-wrote the annals of opera by
becoming the first tenor to sing his clarion high notes in full voice, as we
are accustomed to hearing them sung today, off the chest, instead of moving
into the head register, and rendering them with an effete-sounding
semi-falsetto, as had been the prior practice.
Spyres, in essaying his daring selection of arias
by Rossini, Donizetti, Halevy, Auber and Berlioz, has a field day in
dispatching a triumphant succession of high C’s, D’s and even an astounding top
E-flat. However, this is no crass exhibitionist, but a true stylist who
commands a becoming sense of elegance and musicality in his phrasing to off-set
the visceral allure of his bravura singing.
El-Khoury, too, with her appealingly distinctive
soprano sound, deserves the wide acclaim her debut recital disc has garnered in
the international press. Dedicating her release to the soprano, Julie
Dorus-Gras (1805-1896), the choice items to be heard in Écho reflects
the roles espoused by El-Khoury’s illustrious musical forebear. Besides two
famous extracts from Lucia di Lammermoor,
her fascinating programme features arias by Meyerbeer, Rossini, Halevy, Herold,
and Berlioz.
Spyres and El-Khouri appear in duet tracks with
each other on their two discs, which are accompanied by the Halle Orchestra
conducted by Carlo Rizzi. Each has a well-documented information booklet with
English translations of the recorded tracks.
Delving into some back-catalogue items, I recently
acquired two thrilling Harmonia Mundi releases by the Belgian
former-counter-tenor-turned-conductor, Rene Jacobs. I could not be more
delighted with these purchases. Even after half a century of collecting opera
recordings, I find that Jacobs' approach to Mozart’s The Magic Flute,
with its sublime young cast, combines deeply informed musical scholarship with
challenging interpretive savvy, enabling one to listen to Mozart's last
masterpiece as if for the first time.
Another triumph from the ever-remarkable Maestro
Jacobs is his recording of Haydn’s last oratorio. His reading of The Seasons
sweeps the boards, and is clearly in a class of its own. In the hands of Jacobs
and his team, each of the successive arias and trios in this superlative
recording carries the listener along with an interpretive life force that
matches the veteran composer's own white hot creation. Stupendous. – William Charlton-Perkins
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