Leonardo BALADA (b. 1933)
Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus) (1984-1986)
José Carreras (tenor) - Cristóbal Cólon; Montserrat Caballé (soprano) - Queen
Isabella; Carlos Chausson (baritone) - Martin Alonso Pinzón; Luis Álvarez
(baritone) - Padre Fray Antonio de Marchena; Stefano Palatchi (bass) - King
Fernando; Miguel Solá (baritone) - Advisor; Juan Pedro García Márquez (bass)
- Treasurer; Jesús Sanz Remiro (bass) - General; Gregorio Poblador (bass)
- Scientist; Miguel López Galindo (bass) - Bishop; Victoria Vergara (mezzo)
- Beatriz Enriquez; Antonio Lluch (tenor) - Rodrigo de Triana; Orchestra and
Chorus of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona/Theo Alcántara
rec. live, Gran Teatro del Liceu, Barcelona, Spain, 24-29 September 1989
The Spanish libretto and an English translation are included in the booklet
NAXOS 8.660237-38 [64:52 + 47:45]
Balada was born in Barcelona and went on to study composition in the USA with
Vincent Persichetti and Aaron Copland, before teaching composition at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh from 1970. With that background there is something
wholly fitting in his taking Columbus’s first journey of discovery as an operatic
subject. Balada has been well represented on Naxos in recent years, and those
discs have revealed the considerable stylistic shifts in his work. By the
time he came to write Cristóbal Cólon – the opera was, the composer
tells us in his booklet note, “conceived in August 1984 during five intense
days of planning with playwright Antonio Gala in Madrid” and was eventually
premiered in 1989 – Balada had, in his own words, “incorporated true melody”
into a musical language which had hitherto been committed to the avant-garde.
In truth, though there are some fine lyrical and melodic passages here, there
is also plenty of music which owes audible debts to the idiom of Balada’s
earlier music. Stylistic variation and interplay, indeed, is one of the pleasures
of a work which intrigues and stimulates, thrills and occasionally moves,
but perhaps falls just short of fully satisfying the listener.
The explicit action of the libretto by Antonio Gala (b.1936) is set on board
the deck of the Santa María, the flagship of Columbus’s small fleet (made
up of two further ships) on his first voyage to the Americas. It opens at
the departure from Palos de la Frontera and ends with arrival in sight of
America, the last words of the main body of the opera (there is also a striking
Epilogue) being an excited cry at the sighting of land: “Tiiieeeeerrrrraaaaa”.
Though the physical action is thus quite narrowly circumscribed, at least
superficially, the words and thoughts of the characters generate much retrospective
narrative enactment and some anticipations, in both fear and hope, of the
future.
Given what it seeks to encompass – the political dimension of the voyage,
the relationship of Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus’ Jewish origins and the
expulsion of the Jews from Andalusia, the love between Columbus and his mistress
Beatriz Enríquez de Arana, the struggle to obtain funding for the voyager,
the rivalry between Columbus and Martín Alonso Pinzón, the rebelliousness
of the sailors and the rigours of the voyage, the conquest of Granada, and
much more – the libretto is inevitably somewhat episodic and doesn’t allow
scope for the psychological development of any of its characters. Gala’s libretto,
which makes direct quotation from historical sources, sometimes sacrifices
dramatic power to the desire to impart information. It is, I suspect, the
over-ambitious inclusiveness of the work which finally limits its impact.
There is plenty of expressive vocal writing here, often accompanied by orchestral
textures and rhythms which exist in a slightly oblique – but generally telling
- relationship to the vocal lines. Balada’s orchestral writing remembers his
own ‘avant-garde’ musical past, as well as echoing both Spanish and American
folk idioms and finding room for historically appropriate late medieval-early
Renaissance touches and some echoes of operatic verismo. The choral writing
is consistently impressive, full of power but with some delicacy and subtlety
too.
Carreras give a fully committed performance and the often-present sense of
strain in his voice largely ‘works’ as part of the characterisation of Columbus,
expressive of his anxiety and fear, his near despair and his eventual triumph.
There is a muscular heroism to much of Carreras’s singing - notably at the
opera’s close - but he also brings a persuasive inwardness to his interpretation
of the aria ‘¿En dónde está la voluntad de Dios?’ a piece of soul-searching
as Columbus fears failure. Caballé isn’t altogether convincing in her earliest
contributions, but afterwards sounds every inch a queen, bringing out the
melodic side of Balada’s writing with more consistency than Carreras. Arias
such as ‘Ahora comprendo’ and ‘¡Almirante!’ have great vocal authority and
dramatic presence. When the two principals share the duet ‘Caballero seréis’
it sounds as much like a (neo-)romantic love duet as a moment of political
decision, but is none the worse for that. Elsewhere Carlos Chausson is a consistently
interesting and well-sung Pinzón; Victoria Vergara makes some impressive contributions
as Beatriz, and her Act II duet (‘Te conocí una tarde’) with Carreras’s Columbus
is one of the highlights of the opera, a love duet almost Puccini-like in
some of its vocal lines.
What is perhaps the most striking music comes at the very end of the work.
An eight-minute epilogue blends the choric voices of the Indians, on the one
hand, and the Spanish sailors on the other, with those of Columbus, Isabella
and Marchena. Here Balada’s stylistic eclecticism, with its imitation of birdsong,
its deployment of relatively lush string textures, its echoing of rhythms
from the music of the native American Indians, and much else, complements
the libretto perfectly. The text evokes the moment of landing in terms both
of a clash of cultures, with the arrival of a Christianity intent on converting
the new peoples it finds, and of future human exploration and in Columbus’s
recognition that here is “la plataforma para los nuevos viajes y para naves
extrañas que elevarán sus vuelos de la tierra” (the launching site for new
voyages and for strange ships that will lift their flights above the ground).
The recorded sound is generally good – no better or worse than one generally
encounters in live opera recordings. The work of the orchestra and chorus
of Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu (only just up Las Ramblas from the city’s
monument to Columbus) acquit themselves well, and none of the soloists let
the side down. And yet … the overall conception of the work, its attempted
scope, and the construction of a libretto in terms appropriate for such ambitions,
has resulted in a lack of dramatic tension in places, and of a fully cogent
organic unity. There is a prevailing sense of the episodic and, while most
of the episodes are of interest and some of them have considerable power,
one misses that overriding atmosphere of musical or dramatic necessity, of
the kind of compulsion which dictates what must come next. The experience
– at least when heard, rather than seen in the opera house – is of often striking
parts rather than a fully satisfying whole. Even so, anyone with an interest
in contemporary opera should certainly make the acquaintance of Cristóbal
Colón.
Glyn Pursglove
see also review by Göran Forsling