An Italian musical night to savour

CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★
Puccini got top billing but it was fellow Italian Respighi who stole the show in a concert brimming with gorgeous melodies and a rich orchestral palette. Carlo Rizzi, well known to Birmingham audiences for conducting many productions in the Italian repertoire with Welsh National Opera, spent the dull days of the Covid lockdown fruitfully. Like all opera lovers he acknowledged Puccini as composer of "some of the most beautiful and recognisable arias in the operatic world," but while studying the scores he was struck, "by the sophistication of his orchestration and the innovative use of the instruments". The results were Rizzi's two Symphonic Suites, both around 20 minutes long, which opened both halves of this concert, the first arranged from 'Tosca' and the second from 'Madam Butterfly'. Rizzi adopted a strict Puccini-and-nothing-but-Puccini for the suites without what he dismissed as "karaoke" moments with singers' lines taken by a solo instrument. It worked perfectly:  those in the know could add their own interior vocals (with personal choice of soloists) while newcomers would surely want to familiarize themselves with the original opera after relishing the orchestral versions. The 'Tosca' suite worked best beginning with the menacing brass-laden music of the lecherous villain Scarpia and then launching into the scurrying, rushed and frantic passage as fugitive political prisoner Angelotti seeks refuge in the church. Without the sets and actors one realizes how much work the music does to create the sense of panic and dread. The strings sighed deliciously for 'Vissi d'arte' and who needs a tenor when Oliver Janes' clarinet is so eloquent in Cavaradossi's '"E lucevan le stelle'? Even without prior knowledge the music allowed a listener to follow the drama's passage to its abrupt, startling, shocking end. The 'Madam Butterfly' suite benefitted from some acquaintance with the work, although the radiant 'Un bel dì, vedremo' - surely the greatest embodiment of desperate misplaced romantic devotion - was seductive even at a first hearing. Rizzi elicited excellent characterful playing from the CBSO, swooning, delirious and dramatic. Roll on June 27 for the staged production here of Tosca with the CBSO and CBSO Chorus under Yamada.
A rare performance of Respighi's 'Il Tramonto' for mezzo-soprano and orchestra was an inspired choice: as an introduction to a fine but rarely performed work; one confounding Respighi's reputation as a bombastic 'everything including the kitchen sink" orchestrator; and a chance to hear a rising operatic star in British mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron. The work is a setting of Shelley's romantic poem 'The Sunset', not one of his finest, but it's possible that it attracted Respighi because the imagery of diametric opposition - sun / moon, east / west, love / loss, life / death , where "Genius and death contended" - was easily translatable into musical equivalents. Respighi employed only a string orchestra, without basses, and with subtlety, suggesting atmosphere and leaving expression of emotion with the singer. It's a demanding piece, the soloist singing for almost every moment of its 18 minute length but Barron traversed it with ease. Her voice is a light - not the voice for those heavyweight Verdi mezzo roles - but a fit for this work, a rare type of subdued dramatic scene. Her sweet rapturous tone suited the opening rapture of the couple's love when they, "First knew the unreserve of mingled being,"as Shelley delicately phrases it. When she wakes to find him dead, instead of the expected diva despair or Wagnerian spontaneous expiration, Shelley, Respighi and Barron gave us an expectedly subdued resignation, she "died not, nor grew wild, But year by year lived on," until the end, Barron floating the final one-word summation "Peace" (Pace) with ideal delicacy.
The concert had the perfect ending with 'The Pines of Rome,' the Respighi we either love, or dismiss as a noisy vulgarian. I'm of the former party and enjoyed Rizzi's conducting which ensured that the work's most dramatic moments thundered with incendiary power, the final section has the might of the world-conquering Roman legions marching along the Appian Way accompanied by the CBSO's surging strings, braying horns and a battery of brazen brass, one section on the platform the other high up in the choir stalls, a sight and sound fit for an emperor. In contradiction of his detractors Respighi often uses his mighty musical forces with delicacy as in 'The Pines of the Janiculum' with its hushed nocturnal wonderment, Oliver Janes' clarinet played "come in sogno" ("As if in a dream") as Respighi requested.  Thanks too for a clearly audible mechanical nightingale. Great fun. Rizzi's observation of Respighi's plan to have the sections played without a break brought a musical coup as from the children's songs and playtime cries in 'The Pines of the Villa Borghese' we plunged into the 'Pines Near a Catacomb' with the bass section embodying the sepulchral gloom. 
Norman Stinchcombe