L'alba Separa Dalla Luce L'ombra
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Anna Caterina Antonacci Donald Sulzen L’alba separa dalla luce l’ombra Dawn divides the light from the shadows songs by Hahn, Tosti, Cilea, Refice, Cesti & Respighi Anna Caterina Antonacci soprano Donald Sulzen piano Recorded live at Wigmore Hall, London 5 December 2011 ‘The voice, a dark lustrous instrument that can be soprano or mezzo with equal ardour, is clearly in magnificent shape’ REYNALDO HAHN FRANCESCO CILEA (The Times) from Venezia – Chansons en 10 Serenata dialecte vénitien (‘Mormorante di tenero desio’) 02.16 01 Sopra l’acqua indormenzada 03.40 11 Nel ridestarmi 02.22 02 La barcheta 02.58 12 Non ti voglio amar 02.10 DDD 03 L’avertimento 01.41 WHLive0054 04 La biondina in gondoleta 03.58 LICINIO REFICE C 2012 The Wigmore Hall Trust 13 Ombra di nube 02.48 P 2012 The Wigmore Hall Trust 05 Che peca! 02.38 Made & Printed in England All rights reserved. FRANCESCO PAOLO TOSTI ANTONIO CESTI Unauthorized copying, hiring, Quattro canzoni d’Amaranta 14 Intorno all’idol mio 02.49 lending, public performance and broadcasting prohibited. 06 Lasciami! Lascia ch’io respiri 03.21 07 L’alba separa dalla luce l’ombra 01.46 OTTORINO RESPIGHI 15 Sopra un’aria antica 05.32 LC 14458 08 In van preghi 02.05 09 Che dici, o parola del Saggio? 04.57 Wigmore Hall encore 36 Wigmore Street London W1U 2BP FRANCESCO PAOLO TOSTI www.wigmore-hall.org.uk 16 Marechiare (Canto Napoletano) 04.10 John Gilhooly Director The Wigmore Hall Trust Reg. Charity No. 1024838 Total time: 50.30 CD Booklet RPM.qxd 09-07-2012 10:48 Page 2 ‘DAWN DIVIDES THE LIGHT FROM THE SHADOWS’: ANNA CATERINA ANTONACCI LIVE AT WIGMORE HALL Winter’s chill and a leaden sky were easily and prospect of its translation into song by an trumped by Anna Caterina Antonacci and the artist blessed with consummate vocal gifts and seductive contents of her Wigmore Hall lunchtime a strikingly vivid creative imagination proved recital. Her programme’s title, L’alba separa dalla sufficient to fill the hall on 5 December 2011. luce l’ombra (‘Dawn divides the light from the Antonacci and Donald Sulzen held their audience shadows’), projected the mood of Tosti’s epony- spellbound for almost an hour on that grey mous work across a colourful landscape of Italian Monday afternoon, transporting hearts and minds art-song, genuine bel canto compositions rich in to the realm of Italian art-song and its rarely tonal and emotional contrasts. The verbal imagery explored province of la lirica da camera. It may sound far-fetched to suggest that traces of Antonacci’s stage presence have been preserved on this recording. And yet something of it survives here in the ritual intensity of the singer’s music-making, the fluid deportment of her messa di voce shadings and tantalising glissandi, the silences she conveys between songs and deploys to articulate phrases. There is drama about her way with every song, not artificially applied or uniformly contrived but informed by the particular scope and innate character of the lyrics and music of each work. The conviction of Antonacci’s interpretations stems above all from words and her ability to give clear voice to shifting psychological states. While her artistry has found a natural home on the opera stage, delivering landmark performances of Carmen and Cassandre, Medea and Poppea, it remains alive to the myriad expressive possi- bilities of song. In close partnership with Donald Sulzen at Wigmore Hall, she raised the ordinary to the extraordinary, showing tender care for REYNALDO HAHN the stories of Reynaldo Hahn’s blonde girl in 2 3 CD Booklet RPM.qxd 09-07-2012 10:48 Page 3 the gondola and the enchanting Nana, while Music’), published in Florence in 1581. His awakening dreams of loves lost and experiences treatise included a sharp attack on the short- gained. comings of vocal counterpoint and condemnation ‘I am often amazed by the contrast I notice of the expressive excesses of the polyphonic between the words uttered by a singer and the madrigal. The author urged fellow composers expression he gives them’, observed Hahn in to recreate the emotional breadth and natural his lecture Expressive Singing in Early Music. The inflections of ancient Greek solo song. The arias congruence of words and music mattered to the and solo madrigals of Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove Venezuelan-born French composer, conductor musiche of 1602, together with the so-called and writer. Recordings of Hahn’s light baritone stile rappresentativo or ‘theatrical style’ employed voice reveal the artless simplicity of his delivery; in early 17th-century opera and songbooks, set likewise, the natural balance of text and vocal line enduring benchmarks for the setting of words is central to his Venezia, ‘six chansons in Venetian to music, aspects of which later migrated into dialect’, published in Paris in 1901. John Ruskin’s vernacular repertories in France, England and romantic vision of the city of bridges, set out in the German-speaking world. It took the shaping The Stones of Venice, circumscribed the route of forges of the Risorgimento and the unification a cultural pilgrimage made in the spring of 1900 of Italy in 1871 to galvanize interest in the by Hahn, his friend and lover, Marcel Proust, the peninsula’s historical legacy of song and inspire future novelist’s mother, and Hahn’s cousin, native composers to enliven the repertoire with Marie Nordlinger. Hahn returned to Paris with new works. vernacular verse penned by, among others, The liriche da camera of Ottorino Respighi George Sand’s lover Pietro Pagello, Antonio stand among the finest songs created by la Lamberti and Pietro Buratti, which he promptly set generazione dell’ottanta, a group of composers in the manner of Venetian street songs. Although born around 1880 that included, among others, Lamberti’s ‘La biondina in gondoleta’ was already Alfano, Casella, Malipiero and Pizzetti. Anna familiar in the form of a popular song by Simon Caterina Antonacci’s recital programme includes Mayr, Hahn hoped that his setting would ‘speak a nod to early Italian solo song and the genre’s more directly’ to modern listeners ‘of the glorious enduring influence. Antonio Cesti’s Orontea, sensibility of love’. almost certainly created in 1656 for the Teatro di Italian solo song owns an irregular history. Sala in Innsbruck, includes ‘Intorno all’idol mio’. Vincenzo Galilei, father of the astronomer, set the The majestic aria was conceived to be sung in the foundations for the art form’s remarkable early opera by Orontea, Queen of Egypt, as a tender flowering in his Dialogo della musica antica et confession of love for the painter Alidoro. It della moderna (‘Dialogue on Ancient and Modern resurfaced as a free-standing work for voice and 3 4 CD Booklet RPM.qxd 09-07-2012 10:48 Page 4 piano following the publication in 1885 of Arie antiche. Alessandro Parisotti’s three-volume anthology of ‘antique airs’ contained, according to his preface, ‘the most fitting resources for the purification of taste … gleaned from old manu- scripts and ancient editions, where they lay in unmerited oblivion’. The distant past offered distinctive models for Italian composers in search of a national musical identity. For all his early international experience, not least as lead violist of the Mariinsky Theatre orchestra in St Petersburg and accompanist at Etelka Gerster’s Berlin singing school, Respighi turned to ancient Italian music for lessons in the art of composition. ‘Sopra un’aria antica’ FRANCESCO PAOLO TOSTI is the last of four settings of verse by Gabriele d’Annunzio, the ultra-nationalist novelist, poet his drawing-room ballads, created the Quattro and polemicist, completed in 1920 and published canzoni d’Amaranta at his home just a few streets seven years later as Quattro liriche dal Poemo to the west of Wigmore Hall. The composer paradisiaco di Gabriele d’Annunzio. The song’s chose to set four texts by d’Annunzio and clearly lyrics emerge from unearthed memories of an old reflected their heightened emotions and tragic aria, the symbol of vanished youth and present spirit in his four canzoni. The Amaranta of the title decay. Respighi chose to recycle the melody of is pseudonymous with Giuseppina Mancini, one Cesti’s ‘Intorno all’idol mio’, stated clearly in the of d’Annunzio’s many lovers, who succumbed to work’s wistful piano introduction and recalled a mental illness during her relationship with the twice more as the song unfolds. The speech-like notoriously egocentric poet. Antonacci and Sulzen vocal line periodically disrupts the ancient air’s chart the wide expressive ambit of Tosti’s song- nostalgic mood, a compositional strategy ex- cycle, instantly quickening the pulse with the un- quisitely underlined by Anna Caterina Antonacci’s ashamed sentimentality of ‘Lasciami! Lascia ch’io parlando delivery of ‘Tu non mi perdoni se già su respiri’ and connecting directly with d’Annunzio’s la tempia baciata / i capelli son bianchi’. Tristan-inspired love–death imagery. The Neapoli- Elegant simplicity was Francesco Paolo Tosti’s tan lyricism and overt passion of Tosti’s setting of stock in trade. It is likely that the sumptuously ‘L’alba separa dalla luce l’ombra’ matches the bewhiskered musician, known above all for sensual qualities of a text initially ruled by the 4 5 CD Booklet RPM.qxd 09-07-2012 10:48 Page 5 desire for night and death but crowned by the her death. The composer, in common with Cesti, prospect of sunlit immortality. Desolation holds studied music before taking holy orders. His court throughout ‘In van preghi’, untroubled by affecting setting of Emidio Mucci’s short poem the song’s shifts from minor to major mode and belongs to the past, its conservative style rooted upward soaring vocal outbursts.