Recordings > Choral and Song
LEONCAVALLO:
La Nuit de Mai
Domingo; Lang, piano; Orchestra Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Veronesi. Text and translation. Deutsche Grammophon 477 6633
When a great singer has recorded — in some cases several times — all of his great roles, plus all manner of compilations of songs and arias, not to mention crossover, what can be next? For Plácido Domingo, after four phenomenally productive decades in the studios, the current answer may lie in the baritone repertory he has begun assuming. But as of 2007, when this disc of unfamiliar Leoncavallo selections was recorded, he sounded very much still the accomplished tenor finding new fields to till. High notes tend to be taken by force — in the French-language selections here, zero Gallic headiness floats in the burnished tone — but they are there, up to a high B-natural. Fans of Domingo's voice will find nothing here to give them pause, and by any standard he has achieved impressive vocal longevity. His French is, as ever, recognizable if not idiomatic.
This reading of the forty-minute symphonic poem La Nuit de Mai will attract more attention than Accord's 1996 CD issue, with Nello Santi leading the Orchestra Svizzera and Salvatore Fisichella. Leoncavallo spent four formative years in Paris in the mid-1880s; his prose-setting is competent enough. But the musical inspiration he drew in setting Alfred de Musset's twelve-part dialogue between Poet and Muse is limited and conventional. The tenor, as the former, sings in five sections, leaving the Muse's higher-flown concepts to the orchestra. Berlioz seems a principal inspiration, not only generically but in terms of orchestration. But there are moments (melodies, particular chords) that distinctly evoke Gounod, Offenbach, Ponchielli, Massenet and Wagner. Unsurprisingly for an 1886 work, post-Tristan harmonics make their appearance. It's not hard to take, just hard to take seriously, or to recall. Alberto Veronesi, recently appointed to succeed Eve Queler as chief conductor of Opera Orchestra of New York, conducts with sweep what seems on this showing to be a less-than-frontline Bolognese orchestra.
To up the marketability (no other word will do) of this product, DG brought in superstar pianist Lang Lang to accompany the tenor in strenuous but impassioned readings of five Leoncavallo songs (no "Mattinata" in sight) — three in Italian and two in French. At the end of "C'è nel tuo sguardo," Domingo comes as close to a piano tone as he gets on this album. Lang faces no challenges here and has fun with the heavily arpeggiated strophes of "Hymne à la Lyre." The fact that a second leading veristic composer set lines by André Chenier ("La Chanson des yeux") is more interesting than the resultant song. Lang easily throws off two lightweight salon pieces, "Barcarola Veneziana" and "Valse mignonne" — the kind of music useful for programming under short, sentimental early silent films.
DAVID SHENGOLD
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