Olga Pudova, Chiara Skerath, Ilse Eerens Sopranos
Franco Fagioli Countertenor
Alessandro Liberatore Tenor
Paris Youth Choir
Insula Orchestra
Laurence Equilbey Conductor
Erato 0190296377341
2 CDs
Full Price
The Review
The problem with Lucio Silla is not that Mozart wrote it when he was sixteen – he was already an experienced opera composer – nor that it has a silly story. It doesn’t.
Metastasio’s off the self libretto tells a pertinent tale of power v. love, ending in reconciliation and forgiveness, with a lot of unpleasantness along the way. It is opera seria but it is not tragedy and in the shifting Italian politics of 1772 it was a thoughtful subject.
The problem is that the smart audience at Milan’s Teatro Ducale were infatuated by high voices. While costumes can deal with differentiating characters on stage, the record listener has no such luck, unless following the libretto very closely and, let’s face it, not many of us put a record on and then sit down to be that diligent. The problem is compounded when the high voices (two men and two women) are split between one countertenor and three sopranos, as they are here. There is a tenor, Lucio Silla himself, but a decade later in Vienna Mozart was able to work with Da Ponte and make sure voices matched not only gender but character. Metastasio did not help by having most of the characters’ names beginning with ‘C’ or ‘L’.
For the most part this recording from the resident orchestra and conductor at the elegant hall on an island in suburban Paris, La Seine Musicale, is impressive – so is the excellent chorus. There is clarity in the playing, crispness in the ensemble instead of the veiled and slightly fuzzy string sound one hears on so many opera recordings. Equilibey keeps things moving with commendable energy, without rushing any of her soloists.
She also understands that this is not from the period when Mozart was tackling contemporary subjects. It is from years when young composers like him were fascinated by what Gluck was doing to the genre: tackling classical subjects with the same seriousness that Monteverdi and Handel did. For the 1772 Milan audience this was all too radical, even though Mozart had followed his brief and given them plenty of shrill singers. He was probably smirking when the theatre burned down a couple of years later after a Carnival ball got out of hand. He and Milan never bothered with each other again.
That leaves us, though, needing four high voices of different timbres but equal quality. As Cecilio, the exiled lover, countertenor Franco Fagioli is convincing and sings with excellent diction and tonal consistency: impressive. So is Chiara Skerath as Lucio Cinna, though here the fact that she is so obviously a ‘she’ vocally gets in the way of the character’s credibility – splendidly sung. However, she is too similar to the equally accomplished Ilse Eerens as Celia.
The blending is at its best in the trio between Lucio Silla, Cecilio and Giunia that ends Act II; three strong characters sticking to their own furious agenda with ferocity. I have considerable reservations about Olga Pudova’s Giunia, though. She, rather than Lucio Silla himself, is the main focus of the drama. Therefore she needs to be able to sing the role without fault. Pudova’s high range is that – clear, strong and agile – she is gaining a substantial global reputation for it. However the role was written for a singer who had a particularly strong lower register too and here Pudova does not quite have the even power it needs. When she tries to force in the middle range, the steadiness of tone slips and she is inclined to wobble. This may be because of her Russian training, which often puts power before accuracy. Either way, her shortcomings prevent this from being the top of the pile recording it so nearly is.
SM