Lava: Opera Arias from 18th Century Napoli [Import]

Simone Kermes (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (September 22, 2009)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Sony Uk/Zoom
• ASIN: B002E9HXM8
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #88,551 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More premiere sounds...!, January 17, 2010

By 

KJS (Australia) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Lava: Opera Arias from 18th Century Napoli (Audio CD)

For its selection of 18th century `dramma per musica', this CD rates 5 stars. Of the 12 arias, 9 are world premiere recordings, composed by Pergolesi, Porpora, Vinci, Leo, and Hasse between 1722 and 1743. They are a much needed addition to the `all too few' discs containing examples of their operatic music; as of late, Cecilia Bartoli's "Sacrificium" with 11 world premiere recordings, Karina Gauvin's "Porpora Arias" with 6 premieres from its 14 arias, and Vivica Genaux's "Arias--Handel and Hasse," which includes arias from Hasse's opera "Arminio," and the cantata "La Scusa". There are also examples of their music--alongside other fellow contemporaries--on albums such as Jaroussky's "Carestini, the story of a Castrato" and Genaux's "Arias for Farinelli", both of which I would highly recommend. Unfortunately, despite the current interest in and the wealth of Handel and Vivaldi operas being recorded, many opera works by Graun, Broschi, Leo, Vinci, Albinoni, Giacomelli to name a few, and Porpora and Hasse in particular, are yet to be premiered on recordings. Yes, there are cantatas, sacred works, and instrumental works to be found, but I can only think of Porpora's "Orlando", his oratorio "Il Gedeone," and Hasse's "Cleofide" and the late intermezzo "Piramo e Tisbe" being available (on Amazon). In this sense, compilations such as Simone Kerme's "Lava" are great tasters of the operas that--if all their scores are extant, and after full research and reconstruction--might finally come our way.

The arias on this CD were originally sung by the castrati Carestini, Salimbeni and `Caffarelli' (both taught by Porpora), plus prominent but lesser known castrati Mariano Nicolini detto `Marianino' and Angelo Monticelli, and prima donna Giovanna Astrua. Some singers are not attributed. Kermes does a fine job, but I would (humbly) give her singing 4 stars instead of 5. I'm no baroque specialist and don't have time to wax lyrical about the subtleties of voice and performance, but her albums "Arias for Cuzzoni" and "Amor Profano: Vivaldi Arias" see her, I feel, in stronger form. There are times her soprano singing seems too light and thin, and though her trademark top register is a pleasure to hear, her lower register does not, largely, have the depth and 'edge' required. This is more apparent on some arias than others... I was kept wanting more, to be touched more deeply. There are mezzo sopranos like Vivica Genaux or Jennifer Larmore amongst others, contraltos like Marie-Nicole Lemieux, or even a good countertenor that I would love to hear singing this repertoire. Personal taste aside, I agree with the previous reviewer that it's a worthwhile album to own.

Last time I went to youtube there were lots of official (Sony/harmonia mundi) videos of "Lava", so if you're after a taste of the music, and of Kermes sound, check it out.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a disc !, November 11, 2009

By 

Etrisi - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lava: Opera Arias from 18th Century Napoli (Audio CD)

Only by chance I discovered that outstanding CD by German soprano Simone Kermes (sometimes also called the "Leipzig Bartoli"). Kermes tackles a formidable coloratura cavalcade claiming nine world premiere recordings, ranging from rage arias such as Hasse's "Perche se tanti" to Popora's seductive "Morte amara". Extreme demands for range, colour and expression are accomplished in dazzling style. Former Bartoli advisor Claudio Osele employs light instrumental accompaniment with his excellent performing group "Le Musiche nove" - up to eight players - for this Vesuvian outpouring. For me Osele seems to have winkled out music of superior quality to Bartoli's selection "Sacrificium" that features music of the same period and many composers who can be heard also on Kermes' CD. A must buy !

"Listen" magazine writes in it's spring issue 2010:
Precisely why Simone Kermes is not better known in the United States is a mystery: she is probably the most intersting singer of music-before-1850 in the world. She seems incapable of doing anything by rote - each run, trill, bit of phrasing, attack on a high note and plunge into chest voice is decided by the aria and text she is singing. As a result she can come on a bit strong, but being incapable of blandness is a great gift and could almost be enough. The fact that she is also an incredicly accomplished singer with a sound that can enchant as well as terrify is what makes her truly great.
Nine of the twelve arias on this release are world premiere recordings and most are gems. She launches into the first - a rage aria by Pergolesi, sounding both crazy and like a Baroque violinist attacking a bow; a similar style is used in an aria from Vinci's Artaserse in which she uses a breathless, almost spoken approach to the text. It is hard to believe the same singer can enchant with an exquisite legato and long, gentle lines in Leonardo Leo's Il Demetrio. And for an entirely different experience, in a scene from Hasse's Viriate, she adds a cadenza near the close that runs from high E natural to the A two-and-a-half octaves below. Sometimes she uses vibrato, sometimes a pure white tone. Long-breathed phrases and notes held pianissimo are as beautiful as they are unexpected. She is a singer of extremes and not fort he staid, don't-surprise-me opera lover.
R.I.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Putting on the Agony, Putting on the Style ...., February 15, 2011

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: Lava: Opera Arias from 18th Century Napoli (Audio CD)

... that's what all the singers were doing all the while," to paraphrase the American folk-poet Woody Guthrie. Baroque opera seria was devoted to the Agony of Love, and Baroque vocal technique was above all devoted to Style, to stylish displays of virtuosity, especially among sopranos, whether the singers were women, falsettists, or castrati. Technical display and emotional affect were, of course, not always readily compatible; only the finest Baroque operas integrated virtuosity and expression. It was a formalistic art, addressed to an audience of connoisseurs, and when that audience was broadened, musical values had to adapt. The 'fall from grace' of the castrati was less a result of social revulsion at a barbarous practice than of a shift in the aesthetic balance between musical and dramatic values.

Simone Kermes offers a 'clinic' in Baroque vocal virtuosity on this CD of arias from operas composed between 1722 and 1744, by composers loosely associated with the theaters of Naples, at that time the second-largest city of Europe and certainly a musical capital. The operas were not all premiered in Naples, however; first performances occurred also in Rome, Venice, and Dresden. The composers represented on this recording are Nicola Porpora, Giovanni Pergolesi, Leonardo Leo, and Leonardo Vinci -- all Italian, though three of them worked internationally -- and the renowned Johann Adolf Hasse, an 'Italian' by predilection and by marriage. The arias have been selected from nine different operas, seven of which have never been recorded before. Naturally, these are showcase, climatic arias, settings of texts expressing the most intense passions, sustained by the most picturesque and affective instrumental accompaniment. All twelve of the arias on this CD, to my ears at least, are superb examples of successful integration of vocal virtuosity and dramatic expression, of Agony and Style. If the operas from which they are taken are uniformly as excellent as these arias, one can ardently hope that they'll be staged and recorded in a opera house nearby, so that 21st C audiences can catch up with the aesthetics of 18th C opera patrons.

The expressive demands of these arias are huge. The texts range from outcries of rage and despair, Pergolesi's "tu me da me dividi" on track 1, for instance, to sighs of dreamy ecstasy, Pergolesi again, on track 12. Likewise the texts depict images ranging a storm at sea to the singing of a bird in a cage. Simone Kermes handles these demands with extraordinary flexibility, matching the timbre of her voice to the affect of the words phrase by phrase. She doesn't just sing everything prettily. She growls when a growl is needed, moans or snarls when a moan or snarl is wanted, and she soars beutifully when beauty is appropriate. Likewise her control of dynamics, especially her delicate piano passages and her fabulous "mesa di voce" (sustained notes that crescendo and decrescendo smoothly without changing timbre or pitch, and without vibrato) are all focused on affective declamation of the text. Every aria on this CD sounds like the voice of a different stage character at a different dramatic climax.

The technical vocal demands are even huger. Tuning, of course, is the sine qua non of music. Many lovely voices have faltered over tuning. Kermes's tuning is as flawless as humanly imaginable, across a range from her deliberately rough-edged masculine contralto to her 'flauto dolce' coloratura. To match her singing pitch for pitch, I'd need two instruments, the left-thumb notes of my Baroque bassoon for her lowest tessitura and my Venetian cornetto for her highest. It's not the goal of such dramatic vocal colorations to sound uniform in timbre across such a range, though I suspect Kermes could do so if she chose. In one aria, she descends from sky to earth, a leap of about two-and-a-half octaves, in a phrase of just four notes. Her breath control is olympic.

Fiery passagework and florid ornamentation are the 'elements of style' in the rhetoric of a Baroque aria, and once again Kermes offers a clinic, an encyclopedic 'survey', of the trills and frills of 18th C virtuosity. Best of all, her fancy-work isn't just standardized off-the-shelf decoration; every diminution and every mordent sounds the emotive unity of text and music.

I've almost exhausted my stock of superlatives, but I need to chant the praises of the period-instrument orchestra Le Musiche Nove and its conductor Claudio Osele. The same expressive flexibility that Simone Kermes achieves is matched by the instrumental ensemble, as each aria has its distinctive color and tempo. If you've ever thought that all the arias on a recital album sounded the same, you'll be gloriously surprised by this one, with its exciting variety from sparse, somber continuo to flamboyant counterpoint and athletic obbligatos by the oboes and flute. Osele is a musicologist as well as a conductor; his notes for this CD will appeal to both scholarly and popular taste, and the texts of the arias are included in Italian with English, French, and German translations. Osele himself prepared the critical editions and playing scores for this program. Bravo, maestro! Brava, signorina! Bravi, i musici!