Search - Vincenzo Bellini, Lorin Maazel, Rome RAI Orchestra :: Bellini: I Capuleti e i Montecchi

Cossotto leads dramatic, live performance of a bel canto ver

L. E. Cantrell | Vancouver, British Columbia Canada | 07/28/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"SOURCE

This appears to be a live performance broadcast by Radiotelevisione Italiano from Rome on October 23, 1958.



SOUND

Generally acceptable broadcast mono. The Italian audience is remarkably silent throughout, only disclosing its presence in applause at the ends of the two acts.



CAST

Romeo, a young member of the Capuletti - Fiorenza Cossotto (mezzo-soprano)

Giulietta, daughter of Capellio and betrothed to Tebaldo - Antonietta Pastori (soprano)

Tebaldo, a young nobleman of Verona - Renato Gavarini (tenor)

Capellio [Shakespeare's Capulet], head of la famiglia Capuletti - Vittoria Tatozzi (baritone)

Lorenzo, a doctor on close and friendly terms with the Capuleti - Ivo Vinco (bass)



CONDUCTOR

Lorin Maazel with the RAI Orchestra and Chorus.



DOCUMENTATION

No libretto. Brief summary of the plot. Track list. This is the inexpensive, no frills, barebones version from Opera d'Oro. The same publisher has also issued this recording in a somewhat more sumptuous and expensive packaging that includes a libretto.



TEXT

I have no great familiarity with this opera and I have never had occasion to examine a score. That this performance lasts about 115 minutes, while other recordings of the opera with which I am familiar run twenty minutes or more longer, leads me to suspect that it was chopped down to fit neatly within a two-hour broadcast slot.



"I Capuleti e i Montecchi" is no stranger to such editorial monkey business. When the great Maria Malibran sang in it, she concluded that Bellini's ending did not do her justice, so she tossed it out and substituted a much more satisfactory (to her, anyway) half hour from Vaccai's "Giulietta e Romeo." (One recording of this opera went so far as to provide that half hour from Vaccai's version as a bonus, to allow listeners to make their own comparisons.)



COMMENTARY

"I Capuleti e i Montecchi" premiered at La Fenice in Venice on March 11, 1830, just a month before Bellini's twenty-ninth birthday.



It was a success but it was not without critics. Berlioz, for example, denounced the opera as a travesty of Shakespeare. He clearly had a point. Where the expansive Shakespeare presents us with twenty characters, Romani, the librettist, is content with only five. Mercutio, Benvolio, Lady Capulet and the Duke have vanished without a trace. Paris has become one with Tybalt in the opera's Tebaldo. The Nurse, the Apothecary and Friar Lawrence each contribute something to the operatic Dottore Lorenzo.

,

"I Capuleti e i Montecchi" came about midway in Bellini's too brief career. Bellini was given a contract to write the opera by Teatro La Fenice because the usually productive and reliable Pacini had for once failed to deliver an opera for the 1830 season. Bellini has the reputation of being the slowest-working of the big-time bel canto composers. This time, however, he had only six weeks in which to provide the goods. The first shortcut taken the meet the deadline was in the libretto. Five years earlier, Romani had written the libretto for Vaccai's "Giulietta e Romeo" (the very opera whose ending had so appealed to Malibran.) Romani essentially recycled that, making a few judicious cuts and cosmetic changes--hence the odd name for Bellini's opera. Bellini then jumped in with Rossini-style re-workings from his earlier operas "Zaira" and "Adelson e Salvini."



"I Capuleti e i Montecchi" was a success, but the really big hits on which Bellini's fame rest were still to come. Bellini's music for "I Capuleti" is certainly competent and unquestionably tuneful, but somehow, to my ear at least, lacking that indefinable ping that makes "La Sonnambula," "Norma" and "I Puritani" extraordinary.



1958 was still fairly early in the great mid-century revival of the largely forgotten bel canto repertory, and it was absolutely before the development of any half-baked notions about using period instruments and performing practices. I don't find any particular evidence that anyone was striving for "authenticity" in this performance. I does seem to me, though, that everyone was striving--and with considerable success, I might add--to provide a good and dramatic performance.



Fiorenza Cossotto is by far the best-known name in the cast. She gives a solid, straight-forward Romeo, not as polished as, say, Janet Baker's, but more dramatically convincing. Ivo Vinco, always a reliable operatic utility infielder, sounds fine as Lorenzo. Renato Gavarini is simply a name to me, but his head-strong, passionate Tebaldo is quite good, and appreciably better than the performance offered by the distinctly seedy-sounding Nicolai Gedda in the Baker-Sills version. Pastori and Gavarini appear to have been journeymen opera singers in an operatic Silver Age. They are pretty good, and more than satisfactory in their roles, if not especially memorable.



The orchestra, chorus and conductor all seem to be perfectly satisfactory for the job at hand.



This is a good performance that may be justly criticized for its cuts and its lack ... no, its indifference to stylistic authenticity (as currently perceived.)



Four stars.



LEC/AM/7-08."