The history of the
tenor voice in Italian opera (well,
opera written by Italian composers)
in the 19th century both
starts and finishes with problems; problems
which help to define the change and
development of the voice type during
that period.
At the beginning of
the period Rossini wrote many of his
tenor roles for voice types which modern
tenors find tricky to duplicate. The
more robust of Rossini’s tenors tended
to take their chest voice up to the
top of the stave (F or G) and were not
averse to throwing in the odd high note,
but the general tessitura of these roles
can lie uncomfortably high. Rossini’s
lighter tenors kept their chest voice
in the same tessitura but were able
to decorate the lines with stratospherically
high notes and flexible passage-work
facilitated by extending their chest
voice into the head voice/falsetto range.
By the end of the century, Verdi would
write the title role in ‘Otello’ for
a tenor whose chest voice was so powerful
and could be taken so high that it effectively
re-defined what we expect from a tenor.
The title role in Rossini’s
‘Guillaume Tell’ was written for Adolphe
Nourrit, a tenor with a robust voice
who was not averse to taking his voice
well above the stave, but using head
voice/falsetto. But it was a later exponent
of the role, Gilbert Duprez, who was
to make the most dramatic effect, when
he took his chest voice right up to
top C. This extension of the chest register
(with the corresponding diminution of
the use of a falsetto extension) would
help to define the changes to the tenor
voice over the century.
For this recital, Sicilian
tenor Marcello Giordani, sings a range
of roles by Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini,
Verdi and Mascagni which illuminate
the changes to the tenor voice. The
real intention, of course, is to illuminate
Giordani’s versatility. Giordani has
an attractive lyric spinto voice which
enables him to be useful in a variety
of roles, but he also has the ability
to add a head voice/falsetto extension
to his voice which enables him to essay
the earlier 19th century
tenor roles in a reasonably idiomatic
manner.
He sings Arnold’s aria
Asile héreditaire from
‘Guillaume Tell’ in decent, careful
French, for which we must be very grateful.
His Arnold is moving and exciting, but
there are times when I would have liked
more sense of line. Giordani is recorded
rather closely and this does not always
do the fullest justice to his voice.
He is reasonably comfortable with the
role’s high tessitura, but at the end
of the aria, where Giordano follows
modern tenors in singing the high-lying
line in chest voice, he sounds disappointingly
under-powered.
Giordani follows the
Rossini aria with arias from two Donizetti
operas written for the French stage
‘La Fille du Régiment’ and ‘La
favorite’. Giordani seems to be most
at home in the lighter role of Tonio
in ‘La Fille du Régiment’ using
a secure head voice to attractively
throw in the more stratospheric decorative
notes. By contrast, the role of Fernand
in ‘La favorite’ was written for Gilbert
Duprez. Duprez was an Italian-trained
Frenchman so we can imagine that his
vocal technique and voice placement
were akin to Giordani’s.
With Bellini’s ‘Il
pirata’ Giordani moves into Italian
and immediately starts to sound far
more at home. Though his French is quite
creditable, it is rather careful and
only in Italian do you feel that his
is able to communicate with ease. Gualtiero
in ‘Il Pirata’ was written for Rubini,
a tenor who could extend his voice to
top F (the F at the top of the soprano
clef!). Rubini created a number of Bellini
roles.
Whilst these operas
have famously come to be associated
in the 20th century with
the re-discovery of the soprano voices
necessary to perform them, it is perhaps
illuminating to consider what happened
to the tenor roles in two of the period’s
most iconic operas ‘Norma’ and ‘Lucia
di Lamermoor’. When coloratura sopranos
started transposing the title role of
Lucia down, so that they could insert
more passages in a stratospheric tessitura,
this had the effect (probably unintentional)
of enabling the tenor part to continue
to be sung in the later 19th
century by tenors who had ceased to
use a falsetto/head voice extension
to their voice. As anyone knows, who
has heard the opera in its original
keys, the tenor part is just as difficult
and quite as stratospheric as the soprano;
one effect of the general downward transposition
of the opera was to move the focus more
onto the soprano. The survival of ‘Norma’
in the repertory was partly because
Pollione was written, by Donizetti,
for a tenor who did not add an upward
extension to his voice. The resulting
tenor part, with few notes above the
stave, is one which could reasonably
be sung unchanged throughout the 19th
century.
In order for Bellini’s
‘Il Pirata’ to survive, changes had
to be made. Rubini’s tenor part goes
up to the notorious high F, but the
version of the opera common in the 20th
century enabled the role to be sung
by a tenor for whom C was the highest
note. In his two arias from the opera
Giordani displays fine technique in
restoring some of the higher lying passages
and singing them in good style as inserted
decoration rather than trying to simply
show off individual high notes. In this,
Giordani shows a decent appreciation
of the style necessary to render these
arias correctly.
Giordani now follows
with two more unusual items. Bellini’s
‘Torna, vezzosa Fillide’ is an early
chamber aria written whilst he was staging
his first opera ‘Bianco e Fernando’
in Naples. It is a charming aria and
its chamber scale enables Giordani to
sing the complicated filigree of the
tenor part with ease. This is followed
by an aria from Pacini’s ‘La fidanzata
corse’ (from 1842). Pacini was a popular
composer in the earlier parts of the
19th century but in the 1830s
he suffered a number of set-backs which
prevented him from writing operas for
more than five years. When he did return
to opera composing, it was to find that
he could not compete with the rising
star of Verdi.
Rather oddly, instead
of following on with his Verdi group,
Giordani inserts the Flower song from
Bizet’s ‘Carmen’. Dating from 1875 it
is stylistically at odds with its surroundings
in Giordano’s programme and receives
a careful but creditable performance.
With Verdi we reach
the beginnings of the modern tenor.
Giordani seems most at ease in these
earlier Verdi roles, where the tenor
needs to preserve some agility. And
he gives fine performances of Oronte’s
‘I Lombardi all prima crociata’ and
Rodolfo’s ‘Quando le sere al placido’
from ‘Luisa Miller’.
But here we come to
a drawback. A number of items in this
recital are relatively short (the aria
from ‘I Lombardi’ lasts just under 2.5
minutes). As the recital runs to just
over 58 minutes, surely it would have
been possible to include a selection
of the surrounding context for the arias,
with some recitative, dialogue etc.
This would go a long way to displaying
the aria in context. This lack is most
felt in the second aria from ‘Il Trovatore’
where Giordani disposes of ‘Di quella
pira’ in 2 minutes 12 seconds; even
if he does give us the top C, this brevity
does nothing for Verdi’s music.
Logically, I suppose,
Giordani should finish with something
from Verdi’s ‘Otello’, but this certainly
would have not done justice to the many
virtues of Giordani’s voice. Instead
he finishes with a performance of ‘Mamma,
quell vino e generoso’ from Mascagni’s
‘Cavalleria Rusticana’. But I could
not help wishing that he had included
more of the earlier 19th
century operas where he seemed most
at home.
Giordani is well supported
by the chorus and orchestra from the
Bellini Theatre in Catania, ably conducted
by Steven Mercurio. Mercurio’s speeds
are almost always apposite and he draws
fine playing from the orchestra.
This is an attractive,
if short-measured, recital. Giordani
effectively sketches in the character
of each aria though without giving us
a detailed dramatic portrait; his virtues
are mainly vocal and musical. It is
for these that you should acquire the
record.
Robert Hugill
see also review
by Robert Farr
Marcello Giordani (tenor)