Carlo rizzi the hallÉ MICHAEL SPYRES ESPOIR Michael Spyres Espoir Carlo Rizzi ‒ conductor The Hallé ORR251 Cover image: Michael Spyres (photographer: Marco Borrelli) 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 Répétiteur Le Lac des fées, La Reine de Chypre and David Jones Guido et Ginévra were created for Opera Rara by Ian Schofield Italian coach Valentina di Taranto Recorded in The Stoller Hall, Chetham’s School of Music, Manchester. February 2017 French coach Sonja Nerdrum Hallé Paul Barritt, leader Session photography Russell Duncan Hallé management: John Summers Recording engineer Geoffrey Owen Steve Portnoi Stuart Kempster Assistant engineer Sue Voysey Niall Gault Louise Brimicombe Louise Hamilton 2 Michael Spyres – Espoir Carlo Rizzi, The Hallé Page Duration [1] Rossini, Othello (Cavatine) ‘Venise, ô ma patrie’ 10 6’00 [2] Donizetti, Rosmonda d’Inghilterra (Scena e Aria) ‘Dopo i lauri di vittoria’ 11 4’30 [3] Halévy, Guido et Ginévra (Récitatif et Air) ‘Dans ces lieux’ (Gareth Small, Trumpet) 12 9’06 [4] Verdi, Jérusalem (Scène et Air) ‘L’infamie! prenez ma vie!’ 14 3’59 [5] Halévy, Guido et Ginévra (Scène et Duo) ‘Tu seras donc pour moi’ (with Joyce El-Khoury) 15 12’15 [6] Donizetti, Dom Sébastien (Air) ‘Seul sur la terre’ 22 5’11 [7] Auber, Le Lac des fées (Air) ‘Ils s’éloignent! je reste’ 24 6’26 [8] Berlioz, Benvenuto Cellini (Récitatif et Air) ‘Seul pour lutter’ 26 8’35 [9] Donizetti, La Favorite (Récitatif et Romance) ‘La maîtresse du Roi...’ 29 4’46 [10] Halévy, La Reine de Chypre (Air) ‘De mes aïeux ombres sacrées’ 30 6’45 [11] Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor (Ultima scena) ‘Tombe degli avi miei’ 33 9’40 3 MICHAEL SPYRES ON GILBERT-LOUIS DUPREZ ESPOIR/HOPE: I believe this is one of the most important words in the history of language. Hope is what propelled my dream of becoming a singer and fuelled my desire to learn and to live in foreign countries. When I began my career I read all about a daring tenor called Duprez and how he moved to Italy to retrain his technique with the hope of becoming a new type of singer. Duprez ultimately achieved his goal and went into the history books. I feel a special kinship to this almost mythical performer who like myself traversed the globe in the hope of finding a new technique. Duprez had the daunting task of retraining in a technique which for the first time in singing history implemented the chest voice above the passaggio; coincidentally, I had a similar struggle to find this technique since I began my career as a baritone and was forced to change my technique completely in order to become a tenor. I still remember thinking, ‘How can anyone sing this impossible music written for him?’ It was a repertoire that challenged me more than any other to push the limits of my singing; and now, years later, that sentiment remains unchanged. One of the greatest delights of my life is looking behind the curtain to find the truth, and while researching and choosing repertoire for this album I uncovered many falsehoods. I now see Duprez as a very different singer from the one I thought I knew. True, he was a heroic tenor who changed the colour palette of the tenor voice; but, as you will discover within these often extremely delicate and beautiful compositions, he was also a true lyrical tenor. I hope you enjoy listening to this recording as much as I enjoyed making it. 4 GILBERT-LOUIS DUPREZ (1806–96) ‘A perfectly pure, even, sonorous voice… No word is lost, no phrase neglected, no passage without charm or vigour.’ Édouard Monnais, Revue et gazette musicale, 23 April 1837 ‘...in chest voice, accenting every syllable ... with a force of vibration, a devastating tone of sorrow, and a beauty of sound for which nothing had prepared us.’ Hector Berlioz, Journal des débats, 19 April 1837 AUDIENCES HEARD all sorts of reasons to marvel at the extraordinary voice of Gilbert Duprez. His 1837 performance as Arnold in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell has long been the stuff of operatic legend, regarded as the moment when the modern tenor was born from Duprez’s powerful chest-voice high Cs. However, and as the accounts quoted above attest, Duprez’s forceful high notes were only one element in a complex combination of qualities that made his voice alluring. The Duprez of 1837 was all the more surprising for those who had heard him in his native Paris a decade and more earlier, as a light tenor who made his moderately successful debut in 1825 as Almaviva in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Odéon theatre. After the Odéon closed in 1828, Duprez and his wife – Alexandrine Duperron, a soprano – went to Italy. During their time there, Duprez’s voice gradually changed. He had early successes in Bellini’s Il pirata and in the Italian premiere of Guillaume Tell (in which those famous high Cs thrilled audiences long before 1837). But the most important element of his Italian years was encountering Gaetano Donizetti, with whom he developed a close working and personal relationship that would last until the composer’s death in 1848. 5 The roles Donizetti wrote for Duprez in 1833–5 shaped the tenor’s changing voice. First came Ugo in Parisina – a role that mixes Duprez’s earlier, lighter way of singing with the more forceful style he was then developing – and Enrico in Rosmonda d’Inghilterra. Then, in 1835, he created Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor, which would remain a crucial role for him throughout the rest of his career. When Duprez returned to Paris to become a first tenor at the Opéra, Guillaume Tell was followed by a steady stream of premieres, including works by Fromental Halévy and Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, as well as all three of Donizetti’s operas for Paris – Les Martyrs and La Favorite (both 1840) and Dom Sébastien (1843) – and later Giuseppe Verdi’s Jérusalem (1847). Although his legendary status was by then assured, most critics noticed a perhaps inevitable decline during the 1840s. Duprez’s performances meant very different things to different listeners. To admirers of Italian music, it was the tenor’s decade in Italy that accounted for his success; they could also point to the way he continued to shine in operas like Lucia di Lammermoor during his vocal decline as a sign of these older Italian works’ natural superiority over the ever-longer, louder Parisian grand operas of the 1840s. To proud Frenchmen, Duprez belonged to a tradition of great performers that encompassed spoken theatre as well as opera, and epitomised the powerful yet sensitive declamation associated with the atelier of Alexandre-Etienne Choron, where the tenor had trained. His detractors sometimes criticised his acting: perhaps unnerved or overwhelmed by his unusual vocal effects, some protested that Duprez was always a singer rather than embodying a character. But to Berlioz (usually, although not always, an enthusiastic admirer) and many others, Duprez was ‘the ideal dramatic singer … the most harrowing Romeo ever seen and heard’. One of Duprez’s most important collaborators at the Opéra was the 6 soprano Julie Dorus-Gras (1805–96). In Guillaume Tell she was Mathilde to his Arnold; their joint premieres included Halévy’s Guido et Ginévra (1838), Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini (1838) and Donizetti’s Les Martyrs (1840); they also performed together in other important works such as Halévy’s La Juive (1835) and Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836) – Dorus-Gras had premiered these with Duprez’s predecessor Adolphe Nourrit. In this recital, Dorus-Gras is represented by Joyce El-Khoury in the first-ever recording of the title characters’ duo from Halévy’s Guido et Ginévra. Although his voice became increasingly unreliable in the 1840s, Duprez continued to excite enormous enthusiasm, not least during trips to London in the mid-1840s, the highlight of which were his performances as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor. In the last decade of his singing career, he taught at the Paris Conservatoire; later, he established his own singing school. The latter part of his life included a return to composition (he had already written several works as a younger man) and publishing his Souvenirs d’un chanteur (1880) before his death in 1896. Despite the relative brevity of Duprez’s career, his fascinating voice was wide-ranging and long-lasting in its influence, shaping the operatic repertory – including the works in this recital – as well as future generations of singers. © Rosie Ward, 2017 7 Gilbert-Louis Duprez (1806–1896) [1] Gioachino Rossini, Othello, Act I, Cavatine: ‘Venise, ô ma patrie’ (Othello) ROSSINI’S OTHELLO (or Otello, in its original Italian spelling) is the earliest opera in this recital, premiered in Naples in December 1816 with Andrea Nozzari in the title role and Isabella Colbran as Desdemona. The work made its way to Paris and London within a few years, and to New York in 1826. Otello was a long-term presence in Duprez’s career. In Italy he was an acclaimed Rodrigo (a far more central role in Rossini’s opera than in Shakespeare’s play): he later recalled being over-awed, aged 22, by an indomitable Giuditta Pasta as Desdemona.