ORFEO International – New Releases

New Releases briefly introduced

July 2011 — January 2012

January 2012

Edita Gruberova

If opera enthusiasts had to choose a singer as the quintessential coloratura soprano, the name of Edita Gruberova would be bound to come up.
C 857 122 ITo the delight of her audiences, she has spent the last four decades exploring every corner of the coloratura repertory. The fact that throughout this period she has retained her timbre, vocal flexibility and an upper range extending above top c'' is due above all to two factors: her sovereign technique and her intelligent choice of repertory. After making her professional début with a provincial company in her native Slovakia, she soon joined the Vienna State Opera, which remains her artistic home to this day.
Edita Gruberova als Manon
Foto: FayerAs the new compilation of high points from her career in Vienna that Orfeo is releasing as part of its Wiener Staatsoper Live series, her earliest decisive successes were in the sort of lighter coloratura roles often sung by soubrettes: Norina in Don Pasquale and above all Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos, a role to which she returned repeatedly until finally discarding it from her repertory after thirty-five years. Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor remained in her repertory for thirty years, allowing her to cast an even more powerful spell on audiences not only in Vienna but all over the world. Starting with Lucia and with three of Mozart's soprano roles, Donna Anna, Konstanze and Giunia in the rarely heard Lucio Silla, she began to develop in the direction of dramatic coloratura roles, a development that finally enabled her to tackle Bellini's Norma. Between these two extremes, Edita Gruberova's career contains many other milestones that may all be enjoyed in excerpted form in the present portrait from Vienna. Roles represented here include the titular heroine of Verdi's La traviata (with Alfredo Kraus as one of her many world-class partners), the flighty Manon in Massenet's opera of the same name - one of only a handful of excursions into the French repertory - and her irresistible Adele in Johann Strauß's operetta, Die Fledermaus. But central to the second half of Edita Gruberova's forty-year reign at the Vienna State Opera are leading roles in bel canto operas, operas which without her would probably never have re-entered the repertory: Elvira in Bellini's I Puritani and four of Donizetti's dramatic coloratura roles, Elisabetta in Roberto Devereux and the title roles in Maria Stuarda, Linda di Chamounix and, most recently, Lucrezia Borgia.

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November 2011

ORFEO 2 CD C 828 112 A

Johann Sebastian Bach - Klavierkonzerte BWV 1052-1058

Konstantin Lifschitz has long since established himself as an outstanding exponent of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. He has already recorded the Musical Offering BWV 1079 and the Art of Fugue BWV 1080 for Orfeo and has now turned his attention to the composer’s seven keyboard concertos BWV 1052–8, in which he is partnered by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble that enjoys an equally distinguished reputation for its Bach interpretations.
C 828 112 AAnd yet these works require music-making of a completely different order from the sort that we would expect to find in the Brandenburg Concertos,
Konstantin Lifschitz
Foto: Felix Broedefor example, for the sources, genesis and transmission of these keyboard concertos in the form of transcriptions of earlier pieces raise more questions than they answer. With only three of these seven concertos has it been possible to identify specific originals with different solo instruments, while the other four have been ascribed to various other instruments by experts in the field, attributions that none the less continue to be hotly debated. The fact that Konstantin Lifschitz admits to “feeling now as a harpsichord, now as a piano, now as an oboe d’amore and now as a violin” may increase the demands on the performer, but it also enhances their appeal for their audiences, for Lifschitz has at his command exactly the sort of touch and playful cunning needed to free the piano from its function as a continuo instrument and turn the whole experience into something intensely vital. And the fact that he plays these works on a modern concert grand is wholly convincing, not least because in Bach’s day instruments were evolving all the time and Bach himself was fond of experimentation in this as in so many other areas. Although there is no denying the impulses that he received from Vivaldi and other Italian contemporaries, his quasi-cantabile phrasing and part-writing in these concertos anticipate some of the features that make Mozart’s concertos so special. The cyclical overview provided by Konstantin Lifschitz and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra in the case of the present recordings allows us to appreciate the old and the new in a clear and compelling way.

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November 2011

ORFEO 2 CD C 817 112 I

Richard Straus: Ariadne auf Naxos

Many productions at the Vienna State Opera can claim to be model interpretations of the works in question, and this is certainly true of the new production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos that opened well over a quarter of a century ago in November 1976. The production is still in the repertory after thirty-five years, and even if the casts have naturally changed in the meantime, a number of the singers who took leading roles in the 1976 production have continued to appear in Vienna over the years and in some cases over the decades.
C 817 112 IAs Zerbinetta, for example, Edita Gruberova was heard more than ninety times at the State Opera alone, mostly in the 1976 production. The brilliance of her coloratura singing and the subtlety of her characterization made her a popular favourite with press and public alike, just as they have done in her present-day repertory. Another singer who remains at the heart of our musical life is Agnes Baltsa, for all that she appeared far less frequently as the youthfully impetuous Composer. Many of the members of the 1976 audience must have suspected that in the brief duet between Gruberova and Baltsa they were hearing two of the leading bel canto exponents of later years, making it all the more gratifying to be able to recapture that moment now on CD. It would have occurred to few people in Vienna in 1976 that the other main roles in Ariadne can seem thankless tasks, especially with set beside competition of this order. In 1976 the roles of Ariadne and Bacchus were taken by Gundula Janowitz and James King, by this date in their careers both fully attuned to their roles. With casting like this, the difficult final scene in the opera with its “miracle of transformation” does indeed become the culmination of the evening after Gundula Janowitz, with her laser-sharp accuracy, has already triumphed in Ariadne's great laments and James King has mastered the terrors of the young god's brief entrance scene. King sang this role over a period of three decades, fully equal to the demands of the part and entirely worthy of being immortalized on disc. And who ultimately can compete with Karl Böhm on the conductor's podium in terms of his long experience of Ariadne? If the first night flowed along with an ideal balance between stage and pit and if even the smallest of the secondary roles were convincingly cast, then this was due above all to a great conductor intimately familiar with Strauss's music.

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October 2011

ORFEO 2 CD C 816 112 I

Giuseppe Verdi - La Traviata

Artistic risks facing a leading company like the Vienna State Opera are new productions of the core repertory. By 1971, when a new production of Verdi’s La traviata was staged under the musical direction of Josef Krips, the house could already look back on more than two hundred performances of the work since the end of the Second World War. Krips himself had already conducted the opera, including a performance in the company’s temporary home at the Theater an der Wien, but none of the three principals had previously appeared in their roles in Vienna.
C 816 112 IFor the protagonist, Ileana Cotrubas, the first night also marked a huge step forward on the road to an international career. Few young sopranos – especially in a performance captured live on the radio – have been as successful in achieving so convincing and touching a balance between the vocal agility needed in the opening act and the lyricism and expressive depth of the following acts of the opera. During the years that followed, Violetta became a role that Ileana Cotrubas was often invited to sing in Vienna and with which she was closely associated not only there but elsewhere too, including appearances at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, and the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Both in New York and in Vienna it was Cornell MacNeil who as Giorgio Germont had the task of persuading her to renounce her love of Alfredo, which he did with his powerful Heldenbariton voice – it was not entirely unexpected when only a year later he appeared in Vienna as Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. Alfredo himself was sung by Nicolai Gedda, who found in the part a particularly congenial Italian role to set alongside so many others in a repertory of almost unimaginable breadth. His phrasing was wonderfully simple and yet precisely adapted to his partners’ needs. Not for a moment did he force his voice, and yet the top C at the end of his second-act aria could not have been more perfectly focused. Add to this the clear dramatic accents that he brought to the role, and no one in the audience could have wished for a better performance of the figure of the young lover. The rest of the ensemble, which included a young Edita Gruberova as Flora Bervoix, was admirably attuned to the flexible nature of Krips’s Italianate style of conducting. If only all the classics of the repertory could always be presented on this same high level…

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October 2011

ORFEO 1 CD C 860 111 A

Andris Nelsons - Tschaikowsky

A recent recipient of ECHO Klassik's award as “Conductor of the Year”, Andris Nelsons is now continuing his series of highly acclaimed recordings with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. More especially, he is continuing his exploration of Tchaikovsky's symphonies. The Fourth Symphony and Francesca da Rimini were deliberately chosen in that they both mark a new stage in their composer's development and reflect his attempt to process and sublimate his deep personal crisis of 1876-7. The figure of Francesca da Rimini was inspired by Dante's Inferno, where she embodies a type of forbidden love unable to find redemption.
C 860 111 AIn turn she inspired Tchaikovsky to write a symphonic fantasy both gloomily oppressive and lyrically expansive. Andris Nelsons and his orchestra succeed in squaring this circle of Hell by ensuring that the musical contrasts are organically interrelated, while losing none of their tension and excitement, and this remains true from the threatening chromaticisms of the introduction, which demonstrates that there is no way out of this particular Inferno, to the magnificent climax of the lament evoking Francesca's torments in love. Andris Nelsons' performance of the Fourth Symphony follows a similar trajectory, albeit on a much bigger scale, producing an exquisite aural experience. At the beginning, the fate motif in the brass avoids all garishly empty effects but is built up in an oppressively multilayered manner, while the following dance-like scalar runs and rhythms in the strings and woodwinds seem to be cautiously groping their way forwards, victory ultimately achievable only by dint of a struggle, yet even when they climax at the end of the opening movement they are unable to assert themselves in the face of the implacably recurrent fate motif. The elegiac second movement likewise pursues a quasi-circular course, starting out from the ascending and descending melodic line of the finely accented solo oboe. In the third movement's pizzicato writing and wind figurations, there is a palpable sense of enjoyment on the musicians' part, which in the final movement creates a positively overwrought impression. The decision to return to life through contact with the “people” (and with their songs), which Tchaikovsky explained was the driving force behind this passage, is altogether overwhelming here: it is a remarkable feat of orchestral sonority.

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August 2011

ORFEO 3 CD C 792 113 D

Antonín Dvorák: Rusalka - Franz Welser-Möst

The 2008 Salzburg Festival production of Dvorák’s opera Rusalka was outstanding even by the Festival’s high artistic standards, its exceptional nature due in part to the fact that in the pit the Cleveland Orchestra was appearing for the first time as an opera orchestra in Salzburg.
C 792 113 DThe high expectations raised by the orchestra and its Music Director, Franz Welser-Möst, were fully met, and even in the live recording of the opening night made by Austrian Radio, the orchestral colours and nuances retain their ability to dazzle us, while the conductor’s genuinely dramatic approach to the work is never less than gripping. In this way the fairytale narrative gains in psychological focus and depth, a state of affairs aided and abetted by the team of soloists headed by Camilla Nylund as Rusalka and Piotr Beczala as the Prince. She brings to the role of the water nymph a beautiful lyric soprano voice that retains its focus and penetrating power even in the score’s most dramatic outbursts, while the bright tenor voice of Piotr Beczala is sufficiently attentive to detail to produce a convincing vocal portrait of the hapless heroine’s inconstant lover following her decision to enter the world of mortals. The remaining roles, too, are cast from strength, notably the admonitory figure of the Water Goblin, taken here by Alan Held, whose powerful Wagnerian bass-baritone lends the role an impressive profile. No less imposing is the Jeibaba of Birgit Remmert, with her dark-hued, impressively full-toned voice. The brief but important scenes involving the Foreign Princess who seduces the Prince and seals the lovers’ unhappy fate are a highlight of the performance thanks to Emily Magee’s burnished soprano, with its brilliant upper register. Particularly gratifying in a Salzburg Festival production – and not always achievable within the constraints of an ensemble system – is the casting of minor roles with promising young singers, several of whom have advanced their careers by leaps and bounds in the course of the last three years – hardly surprisingly when one listens to the present recording and hears Eva Liebau as the Turnspit, Adam Plachetka as the Gamekeeper and the three well-modulated wood nymphs of Anna Prohaska, Stephanie Atasanov and Hannah Esther Minutillo. Appearing alongside this team of singers is the Vienna State Opera Chorus on outstanding form. All in all, then, it comes as no surprise to know that the response to the musical side of this production was entirely positive, a response which it is hoped will be repeated in the case of the present live recording.

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August 2011

ORFEO 1 CD C 797 111 B

Press Conference CD Presentation David Afkham 27th of July 2011

Among the new generation of young conductors who have proved an international sensation, the German maestro David Afkham stands out for several different reasons.
C 797 111 BHe was born in Freiburg in 1983 and now lives in Berlin. Not only did he very quickly become a member of the Conductors' Forum of the German Music Council and the first conductor to receive a scholarship from the Bernard Haitink Fund for Young Talents, he is also the first conductor to win the Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award, which he received at the 2010 Festival after seeing off more than eighty rivals.
David Afkham
Foto: WildbildAt the final concert he conducted both the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, of which he is currently the assistant conductor, and the London Symphony Orchestra. No less impressive is the fact that he has already appeared in the United States with some of that country's leading orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, while his European engagements include appearances with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra and the Orchestre National de Radio France. It scarcely needs to be added that many other orchestras of international standing have already signed up David Afkham since his victory in Salzburg. His repertory, moreover, extends far beyond the limits of the Classical and Romantic periods and even beyond the Second Viennese School. Präsentation der Orfeo-CD
Presentation of the Orfeo-CD
Foto: WildbildIt was with two 20th-century classics that he shone in Salzburg in 2010: György Ligeti's Atmosphères for large orchestra and Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony in E minor op. 93. It is clear from the present live recording of the first of these pieces with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra that David Afkham's ability to handle the work's wide range of sonorities is second to none. Ligeti's divides up the orchestral voices in extremely varied ways, achieving a multi-dimensionality that finds perfect expression in David Afkham's performance, whether in denser or lighter textures. With its sense of turmoil and lamentation and its climactic, if ambiguous, mood of celebration, Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony dates from the years of the political “thaw” in the Soviet Union. David Afkham's interpretation is notable for its overview and for its sense of moderation with no hankering after empty effects. That his realization of this programme is so well thought through augurs well for the future and makes one doubly curious to see how his career will develop as a conductor.

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July 2011

ORFEO 1 CD C 830 111 A

Slavic Opera Arias - Krassimira Stoyanova

Although she came to international prominence in leading soprano roles in Italian and French operas, Krassimira Stoyanova is equally at home in the Slav repertory,
C 830 111 Aa point well illustrated by her European successes as Xenia in a touring production of Dvoák’s Dimitrij under Sir Richard Hickox and by last year’s triumphant performances as Dvoák’s Rusalka at the Zurich Opera. And she has also appeared frequently in one of the most famous roles in Russian opera: Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.
Krassimira Stoyanova
Foto: Johannes IfkovitsAll of which is a good enough reason to present scenes from all these works as part of her new recital for Orfeo, an album in which she appears with the Munich Radio Orchestra under Pavel Baleff. And yet this varied compilation includes far more than this, for with Parashkev Hadjiev’s Maria Desislava and Veselin Stoyanov’s Hitar Petar, Krassimira Stoyanova also draws attention to two operas from her Bulgarian homeland. Both are 20th-century works, and both of the soprano arias that are taken from them reveal a high degree of originality in their handling of the orchestra and their melodic writing. With every breath Krassimira Stoyanova brings out all the elegance, beauty and radiant colour of these two very different pieces. And the same is true of Tchaikovsky’s final opera Iolanta and of Maria’s lullaby from Mazeppa, a number which, dramaturgically speaking, provides a tragic and profoundly affecting dénouement to the action and which is sung by Krassimira Stoyanova with all the requisite simplicity, making its impact all the more intense. The same may be said of Maenka in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, while Lisa’s aria from another of Tchaikovsky’s operas, The Queen of Spades, reveals all its dramatic potential. Finally, Krassimira Stoyanova displays her world-class credentials in the scenes from Borodin’s Prince Igor and from Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden and The Tsar’s Bride, allowing her uniquely varied vocal facets to flash like diamonds, while building to an impressive climax within the aria’s overarching form.