Ferdinando PAËR (1771-1839)
Leonora - opera in two acts (1803)
Fedele/Leonora- Eleonora Bellocci (soprano); Florstano – Paolo Fanale (tenor); Marcellina – Marie Lys (soprano); Rocco – Renato Girolami (bass); Don Pizzarro – Carlo Allemano (tenor); Don Fernando - Krešimir Špicer (tenor); Giacchino – Luigi De Donato (Bass)
Innsbruck Festival Orchestra/Alessandro De Marchi
rec. live, 5-11 August 2020, Tiroler Landestheater, Austria
Booklet includes Italian libretto with English and German translations
CPO 555411-2 [77.01 + 72:44]
Paër’s opera Leonora falls among the group of works known as “rescue operas”, an operatic fad that became popular in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Other works in this genre are Grétry’s Richard Coeur de Lion, Cherubini’s Lodoïska, and Pierre Gaveaux’s Léonore, ou L'Amour conjugal, which was the immediate inspiration for this work, and eventually Beethoven’s Fidelio. Paër’s opera was admired enough by Beethoven that he retained a copy of the score in his library. Greater familiarity with this opera shows that Beethoven seems to have drawn the template for Fidelio, both musically and dramatically from this work rather than the earlier Gaveaux opera. The genius and dominant force of Beethoven’s music eventually deprived these other works of any available oxygen and they quickly fell out of use with Fidelio as the only surviving representative of the genre to hang on in the repertoire.
Paër’s opera is carved from softer stuff than Beethoven’s. His music comes across as tinted as opposed to the stronger primary colours of Beethoven’s work. Much the same could be said of the emotional structure of the piece. Beethoven’s music covers depths of emotion, and in particular, loneliness and despair, while Paër only touches on them. Paër’s music has an instrumental beauty and a level of virtuosity in general that is not found in Fidelio. The Overture is a good example of his music, which starts out with urgency and some foreboding but later meanders off somewhat into musical pleasantries. In direct comparison, the Prelude to Act Two is impressive music in both operas, but in Paër the mood is overcast and murky, while in Beethoven the musical representation of anguish and despair numbs the heart. Let this fact not deter one from investigating an opera which has much lovely music. It retains its ties to the older Neapolitan school of opera with its sprinklings of comedy interspersed with the serious drama.
CPO’s new recording derives from the Innsbruck Baroque Festival and replaces the old Decca set; the opera’s first, which was conducted by the Swiss maestro Peter Maag. That recording is only available as part of Eloquence’s Peter Maag Edition (review). In general CPO’s new version manages to hold its own with the Decca quite well indeed. Despite being a live recording, the audience is for the most part undetectable until the applause at the end of the opera. The CPO recording team have captured the concert in sound of excellent detail and immediacy. The theatricality of the piece comes across more vividly than it does on the Decca version. This is the second opera recording which I admired from the joint efforts of CPO and the Innsbruck Baroque Festival; Cesti’s La Dori,(review) was the first.
Eleonora Bellocci sings the title role with commitment and abandon. She conquers all of the coloratura demands, and while her voice has a bright forward tone with an attractively reedy quality, she does occasionally display a slight shrillness at the very top of her range. On the Decca set, Ursula Koszut has the more evenly produced voice but Bellocci wins the day for excitement as the power and weightiness of her recitatives demonstrate.
Florestano’s big scene opens Act Two, as it does in Fidelio. The recitative and aria which he is given to sing, “Ciel! Che profondo”, is an odd mixture of French and Italian, and at the start, it bears a strong musical resemblance to “Total Eclipse” from Handel’s Samson. The aria proper shifts down into a romance with an elobrate violin obbligato. This aria is beautifully sung by tenor Paolo Fanale, who makes an ideal sounding hero.
Marie Lys begins the opera on a high note as a Marcellina with impeccable coloratura skills. The composer gives Marcellina more to do both dramatically and musically than does Beethoven. He goes as far as to provide a strange, dramatically distasteful yet musically rewarding duet for Marcellina and Fedele during the prison scene. Lys handles it all perfectly.
The other roles are confidently sung throughout. Carlo Allemano puts his sizeable tenor to good use as Don Pizzarro. Renato Girolami as Rocco begins with a bit of bluster but soon settles down to give a memorable interpretation of Paër’s more comic jailor. Some of his buffo-like scenes, such as the trio in Act One, sound as if they would be at home in Rossini’s La Cenerentola.
Alessandro De Marchi leads the proceedings with a sure hand. Working with a period orchestra, he is more alive to the emotional peaks and valleys of the work than Peter Maag who opts for a more generalized refinement. De Marchi is splendid at conveying the painterly qualities found in Paër’s orchestration yet he produces enough punch to vividly project the dramatic outbursts. While Decca’s 1978 recording is a true studio effort and the excellent soloists in general have more rounded and evenly produced voices, I would still choose this version for its greater theatrical flair and a cast that has nothing much to fear from Decca’s starry line-up. De Marchi in particular comes out as a clear winner in this release that I hope this will find its audience and stick around in the catalogue far longer than
the old Maag recording did.
Mike Parr
