Italian opera in Japan got started in the mid-1950s. The series title was Lirica Italiana, and back in the early days the international stars who appeared would have had to make at least six stops when flying out from Europe. Despite this exhausting journey the productions, mounted with the help of Japanese orchestras and choruses, were often legendary, and they are now being issued on DVD by the admirable American company Video Artists International.
Last month I said that the black-and-white Tosca from 1961 was essentially a collectors’ item. The Lucia di Lammermoor, also from Tokyo’s Lirica Italiana, and dating from only six years later, but by now in full color, is a very different story. Starring Renata Scotto as Lucia, Caro Bergonzi as her lover Edgardo, Mario Zanasi as her wicked brother Enrico, and Plinio Clabassi as the pastor Raimondo, this is one of the finest performances of Donizetti’s masterpiece ever to be captured on film.
Scotto is famous in some quarters for her diamond-edged soprano voice, but here she displays a mellow warmth as well, to which she adds an eye for demurely-blushing high drama (not to mention a touch of self-advertisement to boot). But this is opera of something approaching the highest order — tuneful, passionate, and given with maximum dedication and vigor — and Scotto is perfectly matched by Carlo Bergonzi, perhaps the finest Italian tenor of his day.
The story is of a Scottish girl who, being forced to marry a rich man to pay off her family’s debts rather than the man she genuinely loves, goes spectacularly mad. It’s operatic dynamite, and like so many Italian operas of its decade is based on a novel by Walter Scott. (British subjects were very popular at the time — there’s even a rarely-revived Emilia di Liverpool dating from 1824, also by Donizetti).
Scotto and Bergonzi are eaten alive by the voracious Japanese audience. Even back home in Italy they could rarely have been cheered for as long as they are here. Plinio Clabassi (so wonderful as Rodolpho in Bellini’s La Sonambula, reviewed in Taipei Times on March 8, 2007) gets less audience attention but is nonetheless superb throughout, his bass voice instantly recognizable and his human warmth totally appealing.
The second installment of Valery Gergiev’s survey of Russian music, All the Russias (Well Go USA), contains two contrasting films, Devils and Once Upon a Time. The first deals with Russia’s perceived need, from Peter the Great onwards, for a strong ruling hand, and the resulting oppression of artists, thinkers and eventually, under Stalin, the entire population. Sequences portraying the operatic Boris Godunov and the real-life Boris Yeltsin are juxtaposed, Gergiev reads Pushkin in a snow storm, and one artist recalls that he delayed moving into an apartment specially built for him by the Soviet authorities because he was “waiting for the microphones to rust.”
The second film deals with fairytales and storytelling. Children, puppets, ballet, and the music of Borodin and Prokofiev feature prominently, and there’s an amazing sequence of percussionist and virtual one-man-band Mark Pekarsky. The astute point is made that under the Communists a robotic, childish simplicity was imposed on all the arts. “The Russian Revolution was the greatest fairy tale of them all,” someone remarks.
These DVDs are particularly fine because they root music in history, mixing archive footage, musical and performance extracts, and modern interviews. Gergiev takes a conservative stand, saying that rule by the crowd can never work in a country like his, and the dark harmonies of Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 8 make you almost believe him.
Opus Arte’s 2005 DVD Chopin Piano Music (containing a BBC film made in 2003) has Alfredo Pearl playing all the Preludes, Freddy Kempf playing all the Etudes, and Angela Hewitt playing the Sonata in B Minor. Filmed in stately homes, with over two hours of keyboard close-ups, the effect is, in the final analysis, fatiguing. An element of creative fantasy such as is routine on popular music videos would have been welcome. As it is, pianists and music students will benefit most from the low-risk approach adopted here, fine as the performances undoubtedly are.
Lastly, Taiwan’s Evergreen Symphony Orchestra has a wonderful DVD of its Inaugural Concert in Taipei back in 2003. The most moving items are three Taiwanese folk songs, two set by Tu Min-hsin (杜鳴心), one by Masaaki Hayakawa. But the feeling of youthfulness and excited commitment is everywhere inescapable and, under the baton of Lim Kek-tjiang, the newly-formed ESO finally won me over to Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, something that even Taiwan’s National Symphony Orchestra hadn’t quite managed to do.
All these DVDs of ESO concerts are well worth watching, and this one is as good as any to begin with.
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