Sunday Classics: Anatomy of an overture -- Rossini's "L'Italiana in Algeri"

Sir Neville Marriner conducts the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in a 2006 Rheingau Music Festival performance of Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri Overture that's even a bit broader than the wonderful 1974 recording we're going to hear.

by Ken

In the concert hall there aren't many more atmospheric musical openings than that of the Overture to Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Woman in Algiers), an it makes for an opening that's if anything more atmospheric in the opera house.

As I mentioned in Friday night's preview, we're at the opposite end of Rossini's career from what I called the "post-theatrical" one, which followed the 1829 premiere of William Tell in Paris, where the composer had relocated in 1824. The reason I wanted to present something from that long period (remembering that he lived on till 1868), in this case the tenor's "Cujus animam" from the Stabat Mater (1831-41), was to show that Rossini (a) didn't stop composing and (b) hadn't suddenly lost his skills or inspiration.

In fact, the very busy decade of opera composing that preceded Rossini's sudden withdrawal from the stage raises a lot of questions of its own. There's a lot of fine music there, and a number of operas that can speak to audiences given adeqaute consideration, understanding, and in many cases casting -- conditions that pretty much never apply. A lot of William Tell itself rises to powerful heights, as we've discussed and heard a bit, but I think it would be incredibly difficult to make this real for audiences and also deal with the portions of it that don't seem to work so well.

In fact, for all the explorations and exhumations of Rossini's vast output, his position in the repertory still rests on the three comic masterpieces he wrote between 1813 and 1817. This may be a good time to listen again to the very opening of the Overture to L'Italiana in Algeri, eight bars scored just for softly plucked strings until that thundering from the full orchestra on the downbeat of bar 8.

ROSSINI: L'Italiana in Algeri: Overture -- Andante, part 1


(1) Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, Giuseppe Patané, cond.
(2) Philharmonia Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond.
(3) National Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly, cond.
(4) Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Neville Marriner, cond.

Note that in just these eight bars we can hear that we have four very different performances, starting with the quickest, Giuseppe Patané's (using tempos very similar to those of Arturo Toscanini) and proceeding to almost equally broad ones from Riccardo Chailly and Nville Marriner. The Marriner performance is set apart by a distinctive, much more firmly plucked pizzicato from his strings.

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Sunday Classics preview: Put these two little orchestral excerpts together, and you'll know the subject of Sunday's post

by Ken

Tonight we have two orchestral excerpts. The first, about four minutes, is clearly an introduction to something. (In the click-through we're going to hear it again and take it just a bit further.) The second, a scant minute, is a tiny morsel snatched out of the early going of a staple of the orchestral literature, which we've heard before and will hear again in its entirety in the click-through.

Excerpt 1


Excerpt 2


The works from which these excerpts are drawn are related, but not the same. The performers in both, I will tell you, are the same: the Bavarian State Orchestra conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch. As I suggested in the post head, if you put the two excerpts together, you can hardly fail to know what the subject of this week's Sunday Classics post is going to be.


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OF OUR ABOVE EXCERPTS, CLICK HERE

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Sunday Classics flashback: Catching up on our overtures (2)

Here's the original Capitol issue of the Leinsdorf "Opera Overtures" LP, nearly all of which has been reissued on a terrific Seraphim CD, with some almost equally good additional material.

by Ken

In last night's "overture flashback" post we heard wonderful performances of Verdi's Forza del destino Overture, Weber's Oberon Overture, and Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri Overture (incredibly, apparently a Sunday Classics debut) by Erich Leinsdorf and the Philharmonia Orchestra from a Capitol/EMI LP of opera overtures that, as I explained in my long-ago comfort-music post ("Just like there's comfort food, there's comfort music," November 2009), I dearly loved in its budget-price Capitol Paperback Classics reissue. I played that record over and over and over.

It's not that I'm such a Leinsdorf fan. I always had highly complex feelings about him, which we can talk about some other time. The point is that the six performances on that LP were simply wonderful, competitive with the best on records. I guess I could have made clearer last night, like maybe mentioning it, that the timing was owing mostly to my way-belated discovery that five of those six performances -- the three noted above plus Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and Beethoven's Leonore No. 3 -- in fact found their way onto CD, of which I was able to pick up a copy on Amazon.com for a song.

The budget-price Seraphim CD even adds four performances of generally comparable quality from the domestic Capitol catalog, with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony: Rossini's William Tell and Suppé's Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry conducted by Leonard Slatkin's conspicuously more talented father, Felix; and there's a biting performance of Smetana's scampering Bartered Bride Overture conducted by another top-notch musician, this one better-known as one of the really fine 20th-century film composers, Miklós Rózsa.

I'm not familiar with either the Slatkin or the Rózsa LPs from which these performances were taken, which would appear to be my loss. I'll have more to say about the Slatkin performances in the click-through. For now let me say that Rózsa's Bartered Bride is good enough to make me wish it segued into the often-concertized three dances from the opera, which I like better than the Bartered Bride Overture. (We heard them, conducted by Leonard Bernstein and others, in a November 2009 all-Smetana post.)

SMETANA: The Bartered Bride: Overture

Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, Miklós Rózsa, cond. Capitol/EMI, recorded c1960


FOR MORE ABOUT (AND OF) THE SLATKIN
AND LEINSDORF OVERTURES, CLICK HERE

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Sunday Classics flashback: Catching up on our overtures

To compensate for our Forza del destino Overture deficit last week, Erich Leinsdorf herewith does the honors.

VERDI: La Forza del destino: Overture

Philharmonia Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. EMI, recorded c1958

by Ken

In the thick of combat last Sunday with Verdi's epic masterpiece La Forza del destino, I realized belatedly that I had broken a Sunday Classics tradition by not including a reminder of how the piece announces itself in the form of a performance of the Overture. Oh, we'd had two fine performances of it in the Friday night preview, but not after. By way of compensation here it is again, in a performance I didn't have on CD at the time. And then we've got some more overtures in the click-through.


FOR MORE OVERTURES, CLICK HERE

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[6/4/2011] Catching up on our overtures (2) (continued)

Here's the Seraphim CD that contains those five Leinsdorf performances plus four by Felix Slatkin and Miklós Rózsa.

ABOUT THE CD "VALUE-ADDED" OVERTURES

We've heard Rossini's William Tell Overture a fair amount -- conducted by Neville Marriner, Arthur Fiedler, and Fritz Reiner. So I'll just say that Felix Slatkin does a fine job with it.

With regard to Franz von Suppé's Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry, if I haven't already, let me say that they fall in the category of Music Without Which It May Technically Be Possible to Live but What's the Point? In a July 2010 all-Suppé post we heard outstanding performances of the dramatic Poet and Peasant by Leonard Bernstein and Paul Paray (from his spectacular Mercury Suppé LP, which has been issued on CD with several Auber overtures thrown in), and wonderful performances of the wonderfully scampish Light Cavalry by Paray and Zubin Mehta. (I've had a lot to grumble about in Mehta's career, but the fact that he could produce as good a disc of Suppé overtures as he did with the Vienna Philharmonic counts heavily in his favor in my book.) But there's nothing to apologize for in Slatkin's performances.

SUPPÉ: Light Cavalry Overture

Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, Felix Slatkin, cond. Capitol/EMI, recorded c1956

SUPPÉ: Poet and Peasant Overture

Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, Felix Slatkin, cond. Capitol/EMI, recorded c1956


HERE'S HOW THE SIDES OF THE
LEINSDORF OVERTURE LP BROKE DOWN

It's just as the Paperback Classics jacket (which by the way wasn't even cardboard, just heavy paper) listed them:

side 1:
Wagner : Die Meistersinger
Rossini: L'Italiana in Algeri
Weber: Oberon
side 2:
Mozart : The Marriage of Figaro
Beethoven: Leonore No. 3
Verdi: La Forza del destino

The only one of the six overtures that's been left off the Seraphim CD is Meistersinger, and I can just about accept that. Not that Leinsdorf's performance isn't up to snuff. It's on a par with the others, which again is to say competitive with the best on records. Still, it seems arguably a tad extraneous -- it's easy enough to find perfectly good performances in any number of Wagner overture collections. (We heard the Meistersinger Prelude just recently, smartly conducted by Mariss Jansons on EMI.)

I suppose you could say the same thing about Leonore No. 3 being readily available in Beethoven overture collections, and yet somehow I'm glad the EMI compiler chose not to omit it. For one thing, Leonore No. 3 doesn't turn up all that often in "general" overture collections, and for another, the performances you'll find on those Beethoven overture collections aren't necessarily all that wonderful -- probably not nearly as good as Leinsdorf's. You don't believe me? Okay, here it is.

BEETHOVEN: Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b

Philharmonia Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. EMI, recorded c1958

I suppose it's possible that the Leinsdorf Meistersinger Prelude has turned up on some other CD; I haven't checked. I thought the least I could do, though, was to plug this particular gap. This is my own dub from my copy of the Paperback Classics LP.

WAGNER: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Prelude

Philharmonia Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. EMI, recorded c1958


IN TOMORROW'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST:
Fun with Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

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[6/3/2011] Flashback: Catching up on our overtures (continued)

As I explained back in July 2009, it was via this LP in Capitol's Paperbacks Classics budget-reissue series that I first got to know and love these c1958 Leinsdorf overture performances. More about them in tomorrow night's flashback. (No, this isn't my copy, which is in a bit better shape -- but I can't scan anything that wide.)

When I did that original July 2009 "comfort music" post ("Just like there's comfort food, there's comfort music"), I was still dependent on "found" music, but that week I made one of my happiest finds: a video clip of a November 2000 Tokyo performance by Mariss Jansons and the Berlin Philharmonic. As I pointed out at the time, "This clip looks and sounds amazing." On digging up the post, I'm not surprised to find that not only is the clip gone, but the poster has been rewarded by having his account terminated.

Let's listen now to the performance for which Maestro Jansons & co. were standing in.

WEBER: Oberon: Overture

Philharmonia Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. EMI, recorded c1958

While it' seems kind of silly to talk about a "favorite" among pieces of the caliber of the six included on the original Leinsdorf Opera Overtures LP -- after all we're talking here about music that down the line falls in the category "as good as it gets, it doesn't get better than this" -- I think I might be able to say that perhaps the two pieces that I most loved listening to on this record were Oberon and the Overture to Rossini's Italian Girl in Algiers (L'Italiana in Algeri). I'm not sure that we've ever actually had the L'Italiana Overture. So here it is!

ROSSINI: L'Italiana in Algeri: Overture

Philharmonia Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. EMI, recorded c1958


TOMORROW NIGHT: More flashback overtures


AND IN SUNDAY'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST: Fun with Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

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[5/11/2012] Preview: Put these two little orchestral excerpts together, and you'll know the subject of Sunday's post (continued)

Yes, you can click to enlarge.

LET'S START WITH EXCERPT 2

It's an exceedingly brief moment of lyrical repose from, of course, the Beethoven overture we know as Leonore No. 3. As I mentioned, we've heard the piece before, and since I like the performances we've already heard, I thought we'd bring them back for an encore hearing. Our excerpt begins at about 0:32 of the Walter performance, 0:37 of the Leinsdorf.

BEETHOVEN: Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72a


Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Bruno Walter, cond. Live performance, Feb. 22, 1941

Philharmonia Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. Capitol/EMI, recorded c1958


NOW HERE'S EXCERPT 1 AGAIN, ONLY (AS PROMISED)
TAKEN A BIT FARTHER -- AND WITH A BRIEF BONUS

Excerpt 1, extended version (with bonus second track)

[track 1]
God! What darkness here!
O dreadful silence!
[track 2]
In the springtime of life
good fortune fled from me.
Truth I dared to speak unafraid,
and these chains are my reward!

Reiner Goldberg, tenor; Staatskapelle Dresden, Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded November 1989


IN THIS WEEK'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST --

In case you haven't worked it out, we're going to be focusing on the full version of Excerpt 1.


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

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