Customer Reviews

Lava: Opera Arias from 18th Century Napoli

5 star:		(7)
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2 star:		(1)
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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.

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.

... 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!

This is one of the absolutely best recording of single arias by a solo singer. The blend of extraordinary abilities of La Kermes with phenomenally splendid music creates a masterpiece that delights the sense of hearing boundlessly.

It is astonishing how 18th century Neapolitan music conjures up in mind the very place where this music was created - a vibrant, sun-lit, sea-caressed bay of Naples, a land of pleasure since ancient times, with Imperial Roman villas surrounding the fabulous coast from Baja and Capo Miseno to Villa Jovis on Capri, with the specter of Tiberius entertaining himself lavishly, looking over the sea from Costiera Amalfitana to Posilippo; nearby that hill, whose beauty was extolled by all who laid an eye on Posilippo, from Glinka to Goethe, side by side with Cumaen Sybil living in her sulfurous cave, Solfatara fumes and smokes, whispering to Vesuvius trumpet. Today the place strikes a visitor with its beauty all the same, proudly displaying its royal wonders at Capodimonte, Palazzo Reale, Piazza del Plebiscito; Napoli's splendid architecture in Santa-Lucia, ancient and barocco treasures along Decumanus Inferiore, Virgil's Castlel dell'Ovo, Aragonese Castello Nuovo - so much there is, in Napoli, that it is impossible not to be overtaken by the never-ending eruption of vibrant nature and culture.

Naturally, the Bourbons had built a theater worthy of celebrating the glory of the city of "Cosi fan Tutte" - Teatro San Carlo. The Teatro was built earlier than La Scala, and was an envy of whole Europe.

It is during that time that arias presented on this recording were created; many of them were premiered in Teatro San Carlo. The whole Neapolitan school of music of 18th century can be sampled on this CD, with composers as Nicola Porpora, Giovanni Pergolesi, Leonardo Leo, Leonardo Vinci and Johann Adolf Hasse.
Their predecessor and the founder of Neapolitan tradition was Alessandro Scarlatti, and his influence could still be heard in works of Porpora, a major competitor of Handel later on in London. The music on this CD reflects this tremendous outpouring of artistic creation, truly a lava eruption of myriads of talents.

My favorite (although all of them are so excellent that it is hard to pick a favorite) is Pergolesi - I think his music is the most multi-layered and manages to play on soul's strings as nobody else's on this disk. Again we hear here that it is for a good reason Stravinsky esteemed Pergolesi so highly. The aria (n.7 on the CD) "Lieto cosi talvolta" from "Adriano in Siria" is simply superb compositionally; with Simone Kermes singing it attains a divine proportion - so mesmerizing is the beauty of this piece. One can dream of Adrian's villa in Tivoli, and imagine the story of this opera - probably the love from the first sight that Adrian was struck with when he first saw Antinous.

The next amazing piece is the breath-taking "Come nave..." by Hasse - there is also a recoding available on YouTube for this, Kermes is an incredible actress!

It is also noteworthy that most of the arias on this recording are on libretti by Pietro Metastasio, a major poet of that time, so famous and sought-after that he was summoned to Vienna where he ended his days and was buried in Michaelerkirche, right at the entrance to Hapsburg's Hofburg. For a non-Italian speaker it is impossible to fully appreciate the beauty of his poetry, but even with some knowledge of Italian one can notice the pleasant rhyming of his verses conducive of being put to music.

Recalling all that make one feel an urge to fly to Napoli speedily, immerse oneself into its beauty, marvel on the whole bay from Certosa San Martino or from Capodimonte, and finish the day in Teatro San Carlo. Years ago I had that pleasure, and luckily I filmed one baroque opera buffa in Teatro San Carlo - "Il Convitato di Pietra", an opera by Giacomo Tritto, a contemporary of the composers on this CD, but less famous, yet this opera on Don Giovanni and his servant Pulcinella (that is a distinct feature of Neapolitan opera buffa) was absolutely marvelous and hilarious, it was written BEFORE Mozart yet one can hear Mozart's Don Giovanni here! I include the YouTube link in comments section, even though Kermes's recording is concerned with opera seria.

I only wish that all the operas on this CD would eventually be staged on location, repeating their premier, be it Teatro San Carlo, which still survives from the original date, to Dresden or Teatro San Giovanni Chrisostomo in Venice, which today has become Teatro Malibran, with performances running regularly.

Brava, La Kermes, for bringing us this tremendous music!

She is really a singer capable to fill up a CD, no - dozens of CDs with her incredible talent, the voice that dazzles and dances, expressing every nuance through a combination of sheer beauty of the voice and virtuoso technique - her pianissimos, diminuendos, legato, leaps of tempi and volume, her amazing range - all is delivered with a complete vocal control. I hardly can recall any singer who can sounds as dazzling - perhaps Sandrine Piau, Arleen Auger, Sutherland in her best years...

Definitely Simone Kermes's phenomenal artistic impression is much closer to the fabled castrati who starred in their day, like Caffarelli, than any modern countertenors, like Jaroussky, whose technique is just as virtuosic, but the voice itself sounds dull when listened to for more than ten minutes; Jaroussky's live sound compared to CD-Kermes is like an iTune compared to live performance, and one can only imagine how Kermes's voice sounds live...

I bow to her in admiration; this recording is a must.

A friend told me about this singer. I saw some clips on youtube and was impressed to say the very least. So I ordered the CD LAVA (and some others) very soon after. As a singer she brings so much LIFE into the music, that some people have trouble listening to her. Some others want to make comparisons, which I find inappropriate, because I find her art a class of its own.

Interestingly most songs on the CD were never performed in recent history, so the artists (singer, director and orchestra) have no reference to go on, other than the scores. On the one hand this demands a lot of their interpretation and on the other hand it gives them the creative freedom of an open mind.

To summarize: I would recommend this cd to anyone.

This disc has led me to discover the wonderful soprano Simone Kermes. Apart from the bonus of singing a unique repertoire that is hard to find anywhere else, Ms. Kermes is an artist of great caliber. Her voice, while perhaps not as beautiful as that of Renee Fleming or Natalie Dessay, is mesmerizing. She seems to not care as much about showing off herself in every note as about conveying the beauty and energy of the music. I never knew that Baroque compositions could be so passionate and exciting! My personal favorites are "Vo solcando un mar crudele" and "Mentre dormi amor fomenti". I have become a huge fan!

Simone is my all time favorite soprano. She has an agile and versatile voice that will sure to please. A must buy!

A fine compilation of 'arias antique' this indeed is, with no less than 9 world premiere recordings.
Since the days the Italian mezzo Cecilia Bartoli started to dig out historical operatic works of Vivaldi in the early 1990's, there is currently a rather consistent trend to 'resurrect' those forgotten works of the baroque period.
All these are very good indeed, since listeners are being opened up to unknown repertoire that otherwise would not have been performed.
Having said that, as the reviewer above also rightly pointed out, in vocal terms, this album does leave room for desire.
Being a big fan of the baroque singing of Joan Sutherland who actually was the baroque pioneer in the mid-20th century, I hesitate to endorse the vocal style of 'the former Bartoli advisor Claudio Osele'. While in the relatively early stage of Bartoli's career she owned a rich dark timbre that would seem to effectively convey the feeling of a 'castrato' singing, I doubt if such is in fact the quality of castrato singers' timbre. But all in all, with the exception of a few of her recordings, Bartoli succeeds admirably in developing a vocal style that has come to be quite widely accepted as being 'baroque'.
What about Ms. Kermes in this album? Alas, I have to admit that my own clumsy ears just could not stand the unbeautiful sound made by her voice. The registers do not synchronise properly. The voice is thin; being pushed most, if not all, the time. The lower register sounds ugly with yelling more suited for rock'n roll.
Oh, yea, you may argue, Sting did made a very successful album on Dowland's songs. BUT Sting did not emply the style advocated by Signor Osele. He sings in his own style, and in very good taste, too.
So is Osele's style ungraceful? Not necessarily, though it definitely has very little to do with 'bel canto'. The lines are hurried and cramped, the voice dry and gritty, with little resonance that the human voice is capable of giving. The Sutherland style of beautiful baroque singing is not to be heard in Osele's. If the singer owns the right timbre, the adequate range, probably something along the line of a Cecilia Bartoli would surface.
As for the impression on Kermes's singing, it sounds awfully like a Cecilia Bartoli at her worst. The fast tempi unmusical; the slow ones unmoving.
In fact, I had great difficulty in going beyond the second track, despite the burning curiosity to hear Porpora, da Vinci, Hasse et al's hitherto not heard of compositions.
For this album's vocal musicality, only two stars.