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JOYCE EL-KHOURY ÉCHO JOYCE EL-KHOURY ÉCHO Carlo Rizzi ‒ Conductor the Hallé

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JOYCE EL-KHOURY ÉCHO JOYCE EL-KHOURY ÉCHO Carlo Rizzi ‒ Conductor the Hallé Carlo rizzi the hallÉ JOYCE EL-KHOURY ÉCHO JOYCE EL-KHOURY ÉCHO Carlo Rizzi ‒ conductor The Hallé ORR252 Cover image: Joyce El-Khoury (photographer: Julien Benhamou) Cover design: Carroll & Co 1 Producer Editing Jeremy Hayes Jeremy Hayes and Steve Portnoi Opera Rara production management Liner notes and translations Kim Panter Rosie Ward Recording production management The scores and parts for this recording were Henry Little hired from G. Ricordi & Co (London) Ltd, Faber Music (Bärenreiter), Edition Peters Assistant conductor and RAI Milan George Jackson The orchestral scores and parts for Le Pré Répétiteur aux clercs were created for Opera Rara by David Jones Ian Schofield Italian coach Recorded in The Stoller Hall, Chetham’s Valentina di Taranto School of Music, Manchester. February 2017 French coach Hallé Sonja Nerdrum Paul Barritt, leader Session photography Hallé management: Russell Duncan John Summers Geoffrey Owen Recording engineer Stuart Kempster Steve Portnoi Sue Voysey Assistant engineer Louise Brimicombe Niall Gault Louise Hamilton 2 Joyce El-Khoury – Écho Carlo Rizzi, The Hallé Page Duration [1] Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor (Scena e Cavatina) ‘Regnava nel silenzio’ 10 8’30 [2] Meyerbeer, Robert le diable (Cavatine) ‘Robert, toi que j’aime’ 12 5’39 [3] Weber/Berlioz, Le Freyschütz (Scène et Air) ‘Hélas! sans le revoir’ 13 8’00 [4] Rossini, Guillaume Tell (Récitatif et Romance) ‘Ils s’éloignent enfin’ 16 8’30 [5] Meyerbeer, Robert le diable (Romance) ‘Va, dit-elle, va, mon enfant’ 19 6’37 [6] Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor (Scena e Duetto Finale) ‘Lucia, perdona...’ (with Michael Spyres) 20 13’23 [7] Hérold, Le Pré aux clercs (Entr’acte et Air) ‘Jours de mon enfance’ (Paul Barritt, Violin) 26 5’20 [8] Meyerbeer, Robert le diable (Couplets) ‘Quand je quittai la Normandie’ 27 5’31 [9] Halévy, La Juive (Air) ‘Assez longtemps la crainte et la tristesse’ 28 8’54 [10] Berlioz, Benvenuto Cellini (Récitatif et Air) ‘Les belles fleurs’ 30 7’43 3 JOYCE EL-KHOURY – AN ÉCHO THROUGH TIME IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to know with any accuracy what Julie Dorus-Gras’s voice sounded like, though in her day she acquired a reputation for rare vocal greatness. What is clear from the historical facts available is that she had a prodigious work ethic and was constantly refining and shaping her vocal technique to meet the requirements of the roles she sang. This iron discipline allowed her to perform a wider variety of roles than normal and placed her among the front rank of artists of the time. When composers of considerable prominence were looking for appropriate talent to debut their works, she was often the first choice. I feel a strong kinship with Mme. Dorus-Gras. Like her, I consider myself a perennial student of this wonderful art form. Like her, I am always looking to grow, to expand my vocal palette in an effort to convey more truthfully the trials, tribulations and intricacies of the human condition. There is no way to know whether my voice is similar to hers in tonal quality. What I do know, is that the repertoire she sang, some of which is featured on this disc, resonates deeply with me. Moreover, the vocal demands feel a natural fit for my voice and I simply love singing this music. This recital recording is both a tribute and a gesture of gratitude to this wonderful artist, who pioneered so much repertoire that still has so much to say to modern-day audiences. I decided to call this disc Écho after noticing that this word is present in a few of the pieces, whether in French or Italian (as ‘eco’). This is especially spine-tingling for me: Mme. Julie Dorus-Gras’s work is still echoing today in the 21st century and inspiring artists such as myself. I very much hope you enjoy listening to this marvellous music. 4 JULIE DORUS-GRAS (1805–96) JULIE DORUS-GRAS belonged to a constellation of leading singers in 1830s and 1840s Paris that included Adolphe Nourrit, Gilbert Duprez and Cornélie Falcon. Her career spanned a crucial period of ever more spectacular operas and changes in singing style, as well as the beginning of a shift towards a kind of operatic museum culture centred on a canon of beloved works. Because of the increasing sway of this then-nascent canon, many of the operas in which these singers excelled are little known or completely unknown today. Dorus-Gras came from a musical family in Valenciennes in northern France. Her father taught music and conducted the town’s theatre orchestra; her younger brother Louis became a highly influential flautist. (The family had adopted the French-sounding name Dorus some time earlier, to replace their original Flemish name, Vansteenkiste.) The municipality of Valenciennes supported Julie through vocal studies at the Paris Conservatoire, where she won several prizes. Her early career was as a concert singer; then, after further studies in Brussels, in 1826 she made her debut in that city (at the Monnaie) in a popular opéra comique, Boieldieu’s Jean de Paris. Her most important Brussels performances were as Elvire in Auber’s La Muette de Portici: she sang in the notorious performance on 25 August 1830 that sparked – or, more likely, was the prearranged signal for – the Belgian revolution. In the wake of the political unrest in Belgium, Dorus moved to Paris, making her Opéra debut in Rossini’s Le Comte Ory in late 1830: she was immediately hailed as an acquisition précieuse for the theatre. The premiere of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable in November 1831 was an important early milestone; Dorus quickly became renowned for her ability to play either of the work’s two soprano 5 roles, Alice and Isabelle, with equal facility. Other notable premieres in the next half-decade included Auber’s Le Philtre (1831, Térézine), Halévy’s La Juive (1835, Eudoxie) and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1836, Marguerite); this period also saw her marriage to a first violinist from the Opéra, Simon Victor Gras. One of Dorus-Gras’s most important collaborators was the extraordinary tenor Gilbert Duprez (1806–96), who arrived at the Opéra in 1837, replacing Adolphe Nourrit (who had been the starring tenor in most of Dorus-Gras’s earlier premieres). Dorus-Gras was Mathilde to Duprez’s famously high-C-studded Arnold in Guillaume Tell; their joint premieres then included Halévy’s Guido et Ginévra (1838), Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini (1838) and Donizetti’s Les Martyrs (1840). Duprez also joined Dorus-Gras, to great acclaim, in works such as La Juive and Robert le diable. Soon after Duprez’s arrival, Berlioz remarked that singing with the new tenor seemed to inspire Dorus-Gras to even greater performances; critics also praised her sensitivity in adapting to his unusual, powerful style. Dorus-Gras’s roles spanned the gamut of the soprano repertoire of the time, from ‘Italianate’ virtuosity to more humble, or more declamation-focused, ‘French’ characters. Perhaps partly because of this adaptability across a variety of roles, she largely escaped being characterised as a capricious diva, as so many sopranos were. Her impeccable French credentials may have helped here, her Parisian (as against Italian) training and continued enthusiasm for concert tours of provincial France insuring her against any patriotic suspicion. She was also regarded as hugely conscientious, working on her technique to adapt to new roles; in 1832 she is said to have comforted the ailing composer Ferdinand Hérold by rescuing his Le Pré aux clercs from – yes – an allegedly indisposed soprano. Before, during and after her career on the operatic stage, Dorus-Gras was a renowned concert performer: in the early 1830s, for example, there are reports 6 that she held her own even during shared concerts with instrumental wizards such as Niccolò Paganini. She perfected a wide-ranging repertoire of signature arias, including numbers from Weber’s Freischütz, Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable and Louis-Sébastien Lebrun’s Le Rossignol (1816; this last work included a soprano aria with obbligato flute that Dorus-Gras and her brother performed together on many occasions). Like many leading singers and dancers of her generation, she was also active in London, where, alongside her established concert repertoire, she further endeared herself to British audiences by taking on Handel and Haydn solos on the oratorio circuit. Her later London visits included staged operas – most notably her 1847–8 performances of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, with Berlioz conducting. Dorus-Gras retired around 1850, and the latter part of her life was quiet; in 1891, aged 86, she attended celebrations at the Opéra for the centenary of Meyerbeer’s birth. The selected highlights of her repertoire in this recital offer a glimpse of the vibrancy and variety of mid-19th-century operatic music, and of the significance to that repertory of Dorus-Gras’s remarkable voice. © Rosie Ward, 2017 7 Julie Dorus-Gras (1805–1896) [1] Gaetano Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor, Act I, Scena e Cavatina: ‘Regnava nel silenzio… Quando rapito’ (Lucia) LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR premiered in Naples on 26 September 1835, with Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani in the title role, and Dorus-Gras’s future collaborator Gilbert Duprez as Edgardo – a role that would remain central throughout his career. Dorus-Gras’s most prominent appearance as Lucia was in a successful run of performances in London in 1847–8, conducted by none other than Hector Berlioz and with the English tenor Sims Reeves as Edgardo. According to the music critic of the Athenaeum, Dorus-Gras’s ‘brilliancy of execution [was] in utmost force’ in these performances. At the start of the two-movement entrance aria, Lucia tells her maid Alisa about seeing the ghost of one of her ancestors.
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