Search - Umberto Giordano, Pier Alberto Biondi, Ugo Tansini :: Giordano: Il Re

Hometown company performs Giordano's obscure operatic parabl

L. E. Cantrell | Vancouver, British Columbia Canada | 03/23/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"SOURCE: Live performance, Foggia, Italy, November 1971.



SOUND: Gala is very much in "Don't ask, don't tell" mode for this issue. My impression, for what it's worth, is that this recording was made on non-professional equipment from a place close to or even within the orchestra, with the microphone located near the piccolo player. The orchestra is very much front-and-center throughout the performance, while the singers are uniformly distant. Overall, the sound is similar to that of an old, clapped out AM radio. Audiophiles, walk away right now, this is not for you. This recording is for people who wish to discover an unfamiliar opera and who are prepared to accept sub-standard sound in order to do so.



CAST: Il Re, the King of Someplace-or-Other - Tino Turtura (baritone); Rosalina, a young girl under the spell of the king's glory - Elena Baggiore (soprano); Colombello, Rosina's fiancé who is promptly dumped by her when she gets an eyeful of the king - Mario Ferrara (tenor); Mugnaio, the Miller, Rosina's father - Unidentified (bass-baritone); La moglie de Mugnaio, Rosina's mother - Elena Jancovich (soprano); L'Astrologa, the Astrologer - Franca Moretti (mezzo-soprano); Il Prete, the Priest - Pino Castagnoli; Un Cerimoniere, a Master of Ceremonies - Guido D'Onofreio; Il Maggiordomo, the Major Domo (also called "Un altro Ceremoniere")/ Un Banditore, a bandit - Enrico Marini; L'Uomo di Legge, the Man of Law - Unidentified.



CONDUCTOR: "Il Re" - Pier Alberto Biondi with the Orchestra and Chorus of the Foggia Opera. Bonus track - Ugo Tansini with the Turin Symphony Orchestra, 1941.



DOCUMENTATION: Not up to the usual low standards of Gala. No libretto. Cast list which is partially inconsistent with the names of the characters shown singing by the track list. At least two soloists unidentified. Short history of Giordano and his operas. Brief summary of the plot.



COMMENTARY: "Il Re" is Umberto Giordano's (1867-1948) last completed opera. It premiered in Milan in 1929, five years after his final semi-successful work, "La cena delle beffe." "Il Re" has never known commercial success.



Giordano was one of the founders of the verismo school of opera, the life of which fairly well corresponds with his own lifetime. He was one of the participants in that competition for one-act operas that launched into the world the very first verismo work, "Cavalleria Rusticana." In 1894, with the great success of his "Andrea Chenier," he became a leading contender, along with Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Puccini for the title of Great Italian Successor to Verdi. In 1896, he re-enforced his claim with the somewhat less lustrous "Fedora." After that, it was pretty much downhill, except for what turned out to be only a temporary blaze up with "La cena."



As far as I can gather, "Il Re" is Giordano's single attempt at a comedy--or at least a light-hearted subject. Gala's documentation goes so far as to call it a "Comic Opera in three acts." That's too far, I think. I prefer to describe "Il Re" as a fairly good-natured parable of "The Twilight Zone"-type.



Once upon a time, a country girl, Rosalina, the miller's daughter, is about to be married to a perfectly ordinary country boy named Colombello. Before this can happen, however, she catches sight of the king in all the glory of his state, retinue and regalia. She is absolutely bowled over and falls completely under the king's enchantment. Head over heels in love with the monarch, she returns to her home to break off her engagement to Colombello. This, of course, is met with consternation from her former fiancé, her parents and the assorted folk of her village from the priest to the local bandit. Trying to put things right, the parents approach the king, who agrees to o see Rosalina. Monarch and miller's daughter meet, and the king is much moved by the girl's devotion and obvious infatuation with him. Nevertheless, he decided to do what is best for the girl. He commands his attendants to remove his crown, wig and all the rest of his royal trappings. Rosalina at last sees him as just a bald, sagging, old man, at which point the last vestige of enchantment flickers out. Rosalina, with the king's blessing, returns to her village, her parents and to the faithful Colombello for a happy reunion.



"Il Re" is separated into three acts, with two intermezzi to mark the divisions. The accompanying booklet from Gala suggests that it is normally performed straight through without breaks. The opera contains about 67 minutes of music, about same as a comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan or "The Merry Widow," but there is no spoken dialogue to extend the show into a full evening's entertainment.



Musically, the opera displays its sonorous verismo roots from beginning to end. Thickly strewn among the Chenier/Fedora-like elements, however, are passages of a much spikier, more jagged idiom. Giordano's attempts to come to grips with "modernism" are very much like a scattering of art deco angularity amid art nouveau lushness. The effect is not, to my ear, anyway, "modernism" but rough-hewn and unpolished verismo.



Foggia is an agricultural market center in the south of Italy with a population of about 150,000. It is Giordano's hometown and he is something of a local hero there. I assume that this recording presents the local opera company, its orchestra and its largely amateur chorus. I have no familiarity with this opera beyond what is presented here, but I have no reason to doubt that this is a generally sound performance of "Il Re" that extracts from it about as much as Giordano put into the piece in the first place.



The singers seem a fairly competent bunch. No one of them is an obvious star, but I'd have no objections to them appearing in the next production of my local opera company. The best of them is probably the Rosalina, Elena Baggiore, a soprano of the weighty-voiced Tebaldi- or Milanov-type, now, alas, almost vanished from the face of the earth. It is almost unfair of Gala to provide a bonus track in which Lina Pagliughi in a 1941 recording duplicates Baggiore's biggest showpiece, "Colombello, sposati sarebbe un ingannarti." A comparison of the two renditions of the aria demonstrates very clearly the difference between a competent opera singer and an opera star.



In the normal course of affairs, I would assign four stars to this recording for those potential purchasers willing to seek it out as an obscure item of specialist interest. However, the quality of sound is such that I can't in good conscience assign more than three stars."