Customer Reviews

Beethoven: Fidelio / Norman, Goldeberg, Moll, Coburn, Blochwitz, Wlaschiha, Schmidt; Haitink

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This set, while not as hyped-up as many others, offers a listener's delight of a first rate. First and foremost, Haitink's choice for Leonore is the incredible and versatile Jessye Norman who can sound masculine being blessed with powerful and smooth lower register. That's why, really, her masking as a man works. Yet her "Wo eilst du hin?" and duet with Florestan is full of very feminine love and even a touch of vulnerability. With her superb musical intelligence, nothing is over-acted, but sang beautifully in fresh pure voice. Her Florestan, Reiner Goldberg, manages convincingly the portrayal of a man exhausted by prison and injustice. Quite a few tenors are known to practically scream this part, so one makes an assumption that the prison food could not be really that bad. Goldberg's portrayal is the most accurate. Kurt Moll seems to be over-cast as Rocco, but it's a pleasant treat to hear such a majestic bass in this role. Past examples show how important it is to actually over-cast a bass here, remember Gotlob Frick? Ekkehard Wlaschina comes through as subtle, even if not as much as Leiferkus or Fischer-Diescau, but darker, heavier, very evil Pizarro. Another surprise is the great choice for second tenor -- Andreas Schmidt as Don Fernando. Maestro Haitink stashes the Leonore III overture at the very end, and it provides a good conclusion to 2+ hours of Beethoven pleasure. Philips' crystal-clear digital recording and ideal balancing make it a preferred choice over old recordings, great as they might be. This recording, as many of the company's morsels, is rapidly disappearing from the US market, so get it while it lasts.

I have a number of recordings of Fidelio, and even two of its original version, Leonore. They all thrill me for one reason or other. Ludwig is wonderful, even if a bit pressed as Leonore, and who compares to John Vickers as Florestan. I bought this recording only because if was another Jessye Norman recording, and I must say, I got more than I bargained for.

Norman was compelling. The way she uses her voice, both very heavy and dark when needed or light and sweat when required. She blended well with the other singers. Her Leonore was a woman of soul, one intent on going through with her masquerade as a man inorder to find her husband. Norman adds a suitable darkness that could actually pass her off as a man better than any other I have heard, but when with her husband the womanly and wifely joys fill her sounds. Her voice is very grand, and I gather would remind one of when Flagstad sang the role at the Met. Since I was not born at that time, I cannot say for sure about that. However, few Leonores have been so full-voiced as Norman. The other singers were truly wonderful too. I was so impressed, and to think, even by a Florestan whose voice is by no means as huge a Vickers!

The real miracle of this opera is not so much the singing, which is a revelation, but the opera itself. Beethoven had been nearly deaf for a decade by the time he wrote it. He hearing left him at 28, and much later he wrote this opera, then year later revised it as the opera we know now. A man so tormented by his physical failings, so unlucky in his choice of loves, yet could represent true devotion, true dedication, and total commitment between a man and wife. And he did it all while deaf as a nail. This music, like so much that was to follow came from Beethoven's soul and not his intellect. This recording truly portrays the miracle the opera was, and the truth behind the sentiments it expresses.

Already before it appeared this recording had the look of a winning combination: Haitink had successfully conducted "Fidelio" at the Met and in 1989 Jessye Norman was still in possession of the grandest voice since Flagstad in her prime. But in the event, despite its promise and the desirability of a new interpretation in digital sound, this set turned out to be a disappointment. In Norman's case, a noble voice proved inadequate if it was not to be paired with the sense of drama and acute facility with the text evinced by rival interpreters such as Ludwig or Nilsson, and Haitink seems to have jettisoned the excitement which apparently characterised his live performances in favour of a literalism which borders on the inert. It is not so much the case that his speeds are slow, as that he fails to phrase and rhythms remain slack.

This melancholy conclusion holds good throughout a side-by-side comparison of the main features of this recording with those of the earlier sets conducted by Klemperer and Maazel. Take the famous Prisoners' Chorus; Klemperer generates spiritual intensity, Maazel a searing desperation, and Haitink...well, virtually nothing other than a serviceable run through the score. As Florestan and Pizarro, Vickers and Berry for Klemperer and McCracken and Krause for Maazel respectively have twice the voice of the generally light-voiced or simply inadequate singers available to Haitink. The tenor First Prisoner is dreadful. Andreas Schmidt has an attractive baritone with a fast vibrato, but can in no wise emulate the frisson that Franz Crass's noble baritone creates for Klemperer when Don Fernando arrives to punish evildoers. I am mystified to read elsewhere rapturous appreciations of Wlaschiha's windy, grainy Pizarro; wholly unable to conjure up the Grand Guignol of his predecessors' assumptions through vocal means alone, he shouts and blusters his way through the part. Reiner Goldberg was probably at that time the best tenor of the type required that Decca could find but I have heard him sing with fuller, more attractive tone in other roles; here his tone is frequently throttled. In comparison with both his stage wife and his illustrious recorded forebears, his inadequacy is all too plain to hear; he is a like a male spider, vocally devoured by his mate.

Of course there are bright spots. The glory of Norman's singing as singing per se is one - yet even Norman's vocalism sounds to me at times not so much uncomfortable as manufactured in the upper reaches of her voice: the top B's and B flats sound disjointed from the rest of the voice and I have already noted her lack of engagement with text. Kurt Moll's Rocco is almost a case of over-casting but he is as firm and sonorous as ever, and makes much more of his words than Norman - even if his is a rather noble sound for a character who extols the joys of money. The dialogue is clearly, intelligently and pacily delivered. The Dresden Staatskapelle and the State Opera Chorus are fine - but the latter are outshone by both Wilhem Pitz's Philharmonia Chorus and the Vienna State Opera Choir, who sing with more power and expressivity. The recorded sound in the Lukaskirche is warm and spacious. There is some sweet, innocuous singing from the young lovers, Pamela Coburn and Hans Peter Blochwitz. Yet even the divine quartet "Mir ist so wunderbar" fails to take off; I turned with relief from Haitink's stodgy version to Klemperer's glowing account.

Comparisons are odorous, but unless you are a diehard Jessye Norman fan-completist, or must have digital sound, I can see no good reason for preferring this to the classic versions by Klemperer and Maazel - or, for some tastes, those by Karajan and Bernstein.

This 2 CD set is now available as one of a new series of bargain re-issues by Decca in crude, 1960's pop-art style in hideous, acidic colours. Despite their appearance, they are very good value, even if there is no libretto.

Bernard Haitink conducted Fidelio at the Metropolitan Opera in the spring of 1982. Even though the orchestra fell in love with him, he was never invited back to the house. As it happens--and despite a dreadful Florestan, Edward Sooter--Haitink's performances, with Johanna Meier as a radiant and memorable Leonore, were by a considerable margin the best-conducted Fidelios this reviewer ever heard, live or recorded, in forty-five years of listening to the opera and witnessing it in the theater.

Naturally, I hoped that Haitink would get round to recording the opera. From this recording (whose continued availability came as a big surprise) no one who hadn't heard the Met performances would ever believe that Haitink was a master of the score (in truth, he is much less inspiring here than he was at the Met in 1982). Perhaps it is possible, as legions of critics assert, to somehow separate the conducting from the singing by means of an auditory-mental sifting process. Still, in this case the sifter would need to remove not merely a squally, uninspired Florestan, an off-the-rack pair of youngsters, a Rocco whose notable interpreter in this instance gives less than his remarkable best, and a Pizarro who consistently substitutes bluster for insight. No, the matter to be sifted out extends all the way to the Leonore, the superstar in whose celebrity this recording finds its raison d'être.

As Santa Fe listener rightly notes, Jessye Norman's voice is glorious, but what she does with it is anything but. Characterization is minimal; she conveys little sense that she knows what Leonore's predicament is or what her words mean (her diction, however, is clear and her pronunciation good to excellent). It is as if Norman came to the studio merely to share the luxuriant bounty of her voice. For her fans, perhaps that was and is quite enough. Yet for other lovers of Fidelio, her lack of involvement may transform the opera from the intended paean to conjugal love to a stroll down Diva Lane.

Under the circumstances, could even someone predisposed to admire the conductor's work find enough that is praiseworthy to recommend this recording to others? Only, alas, by pretending that the singing doesn't matter. The problem, moreover, is not unique to this Fidelio. It rears its head in such recordings as Bernstein's Carmen and Harnoncourt's Aïda. Nor are these the sole examples one could cite.

It is unlikely but not impossible that Haitink will be offered the chance to make another recording of Fidelio, one in which he and an able cast cooperate with the composer to bring this masterpiece to the vivid life that the present recording actively works at extinguishing. In the meantime, accounts of the opera led by Fricsay, Karajan, Mackerras, Harnoncourt, Böhm, Klemperer (the live recording on Testament rather than the EMI studio recording), Bernstein, Furtwängler, Knappertsbusch, Maazel, and (if one can put up with the sound of a 1941 aircheck) Bruno Walter are far, far more recommendable. Whatever their incidental failings, each succeeds in transmitting a substantial part of this great opera's essential incandescence.

ABOUT THE ALBUM: FIDELIO (BEETHOVEN), CAST: Jessye Norman (Fidelio), Reiner Goldberg(Florestan) Kurt Moll (Pizarro) Andreas Schmidt (Don Fernando) Patricia Coburn(Marsellina) Conductor Bernard Haitink, Dresden Staatskapelle Orchestra, Recorded 1992 for Phillips

In the early 1990's, black diva Jessye Norman was flexing her opera muscles as never before, eventhough her career was entering its final phase. With the Dresden State Opera she recorded Salome opposite James Morris under Seiji Ozawa's baton and from this same period came Fidelio, Beethoven's only operatic venture and it is an opera still performed today for it's musical and artistic values and for its Beethoven namesake. Jessye Norman is doing what she did with Salome: she puts on a one-woman show. While I enjoyed her very nuanced Salome, her Fidelio is nothing but showy soprano fireworks and sounds more like she's in a large choral with a soprano lead. True, the voice is in good shape and she sounds controlled in every intimate scene and aria, save for parts that seem to require for her to be at the top of the ensembles. Kurt Moll is also doing a marvelous job as the villainous Pizarro, although Moll's noble, spiritual voice is more suited to Sarastro from Mozart's The Magic Flute than a wicked baritone character like the one he portrays in Fidelio. Still, it's very polished, regal and dark, and well done, a perfect alignment with Jessye Norman's equally dark voice. The rest of the cast flounder. Reiner Goldberg's Florestan can sound like a weakened and hopeless prisoner but this is very disappointing when audiences have heard more stout and more heroic sounding "romanticism" Fidelios like that of Jon Vickers. Fidelio ought to appear noble and Jesus like but still quite powerful, at least to match the power of the soprano singing the heavy role of Leonore. Everyone else is serviceable, bland and even Mozartian like in their singing, especially when we consider the spoken parts are alsos central to the story and sound like German spingsiel, which is perhaps what this work seems to be drawn from. The spoken parts are well acted but the singers who are not the leads are too boring and fail to impress operatically speaking. This is the real downside along with the flavorless conducting. The cast should sound epic, and even the choruses here are very dull. It's sad that Jessye Norman was at this time teamed up with really weak people.

The reason this album was at one time very popular and commercially appealing was Jessye Norman herself. She could carry an entire opera alone, and her status as diva was by this time established and she could do whatever she wanted to do. Opting not to sing the heavy Wagner roles like Brunnhilde or Isolde, which really would have been magnificent, she chose instead to champion the works that sopranos in her day did not undertake. Oddly enough, while appearing to be singing anti-diva roles and various operas no one else wanted to touch at the time, she was also making herself more of a diva then ever. Her Leonore is noble and grand, and her usual regal flair (like Leontyne Price but with heavier voice) is all over this. She sounds like a Queen coming to bail her King from wrongful imprisonment. But because she's so talented vocally and can shade her voice, she manages to sound vulnerable, powerless and touching, a feminine contrast to the parts requiring her to sing like the man- Fidelio - she is pretending to be. This odd gender change has always captivated operaphiles and it speaks of Beethoven's feminine and masculine side as well and universally speaking, all humanity's. The theme of redemption, rescue and triumph over adversity and ignorance through compassion and enlightenment was very significant to Beethoven, who continually expressed his humanistic philosophies through music.

Fidelio can be a musical masterpiece in the hands of the right conductor or orchestra. Karajan, Bohm and Klemperer achieved the perfect sound of Fidelio - epic, grandly noble, warm, touching, a religous experience almost. But these conductors have all been Germans who managed to understand the essentially Germanic music (Beethoven too was Germanic). Bernard Haitink does a very irksome job of conducting. It's over much too soon, it's experimental and it shows. He did not put any real effort to bring out the spiritual drama lurking behind the classical and pre-Romanticism phrasing of Beethoven's signature music. It's just a straight symphony-meets-opera or chorale-meets-opera deal and that is a crying shame when it can be more of an experience.

Do yourself a favor. Don't buy this. Get Karajan, Klemperer or Bohm and preferably Klemperer which can never be beaten as a recording. This one is just too rushed and boring. I have never ever given any recording I've heard this kind of criticism and bashing (only one star) but this one is so awful that if it was a movie, I'd walk out of the theater.

After watching a Met production of Fidelio (with Mattila and Pape), I decided to give the opera another try. I hadn't liked it when I listened to the Ludwig-Vickers version a few years ago. What was wrong with me? Fidelio is a remarkable work of art, and the quartet "Mir Ist so Wunderbar" in Act I is among the most sublime music ever written. In this recording, Norman is clearly the star, yet the other soloists are quite fine too. Along with this recording, I'd also bought a version with Birgit Nilsson and must say Norman is far, far better in the role of Leonore; she reminds me more of Flagstad because the voice is more traditionally beautiful than Nilsson's. (Yet I have to say I have Nilsson's recordings of Un Ballo, Macbeth, and Aida, and she sounds as magnificent as those other two divine singers, so perhaps, I should just say that Nilsson isn't in best voice on the Fidelio recording.) Leonore and Rosina (in Nozze) are two of Norman's finest vocal achievements on record. It seems this cd set has gone out of print, so snatch it up when you have a chance; otherwise, it will be a sinful omission from your music library.

I purchased this FIDELIO recording soon after it was released in the early 1990's and learned, only after reading reviews in some of the major classical music and opera magazines that I was listening to a recording I should not enjoy and should make me long for the far better recordings that are available. I discovered this, of course, after listening to it many times and enjoying it thoroughly. Since that time I have heard other recordings and have heard live performances broadcast from New York's Metropolitan Opera. While I will admit there are some better sets available, this is still a worthwhile set.

The best known performers on the set are Jessye Norman and Kurt Moll. It is safe to say that recording was made to showcase the diverse talents of Ms. Norman, and overall, she does do an adequate job though there are some moments where what is supposed to be dramatic intensity can sound almost like screeching. Moll's Rocco is generally strong but like Ms. Norman, not perfect. The role of Florestan, sung by tenor Reiner Goldberg does have expression. In his showpiece aria in Act II "Gott Welch Dunkel Heir" he does sound like a prisoner in chains (in a good sense: he is a prisoner after all), but he is not as strong a performer as the other principals. I was not surprised to enjoy the orchestra under the direction of Bernard Haitink, and the choral works are good on the recording, though the finale could probably be a bit more nuanced.

So do I recommend this set? As I mentioned it is the first FIDELIO I purchased and it is the FIDELIO by which I measure others. I still enjoy this set and know many others who do, but some of the other sets feature some of the greats of this repertoire: The Klemperer version with Christa Ludwig and John Vickers as Leonore and Florestan respectively or Decca's version under Maazel with James McCracken and Brigit Nilsson to name two, so there is some excellent competition. Still it is worthwhile and if you're not familiar with the opera, this set will help you fall in love with Beethoven's only opera.

I was extremely disappointed with this set. I had anticipated that Norman would be a great Leonore, and if you get past her stately approach to the role, for sheer vocal glory she is unmatched on records--only the young Flagstad would have surpassed her, but Flagstad didn't record the role until late in her career.

Sadly, nothing else is much good here. Haitink lapses into weak rhythms and a general sense of lassitude that perplexes me. That flaw alone wouldn't be enough to sink the production, but then there is the thin, nasal voice of Reiner Goldberg, who is nowhere close to being an adequate Florestan. He sounds like Norman's lapdog, despite his desperate efforts to beef up his tone when they sing togehter.

All in all, a major letdown and a grievously missed opportunity.

The CDs are in great condition, and I love this recording. I am not sure if the case was broken before they shipped it, or if it broke in transit, but the jewel case cover was broken and the little plates things that hold the CDs in place were broken so that the disks were free-floating in the case.