Customer Reviews

Tatjana

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What a lovely surprise for Christmas time -- a newly recorded opera by Lehar, full of lush orchestrations, melodies and a strong cast of artists. Listeners are probably not familiar with this opera, very early in Lehar's career. It is serious -- set in Russia with a finale in the Siberian snow where the lovers perish in the snow (yes, a bit like the finale of Puccini's Manon Lescaut). I recommend this well-done recording for Lehar fans -- it is enchanting.

Franz Lehár's most famous operettas are still relatively often performed. But Tatjana is not an operetta - it is a full-scale tragic opera that Lehár composed before he recognized his true calling. It was premiered in 1896 under the title Kukushka, but revised and given as Tatjana in 1906 in Vienna - and was a failure. No wonder, really - despite some fine themes and nice coloration (the best being usually the elements that point forward towards Lehár the operetta composer), the work is pretty undistinguished with long stretches of desperately thin and uninspired musc. Even the lengthy prelude fails to sustain interest, being meandering and empty. The work as a whole lacks momentum and real drama - the climaxes are uniformly underdeveloped and hollow, the characters are pretty two-dimensional, or at least the music they get is usually rather uninteresting. Even the arias are relatively trite, despite a nice tune coming to the surface once in a while.

The largest role, Alexis, is acceptably taken by Herbert Lippert, but his voice isn't always in the best shape, sounding strained and whiny at times. Dagmar Schellenberger's Tatjana is generally very well sung, but unfortunately her musical material is usually pretty weak. The other roles are generally fine if not outstanding and the orchestra and chorus seem to do the most out of what they have to work with. Michail Jurowski seems to knit as tight a drama together as one could reasonably ask for, but sometimes he forgoes the opportunity to emphasize whatever thematic material he has access to (which isn't a lot). Oh well, then - this is a reasonably good realization of a work that has more historical than musical interest. Of all the interesting late romantic operas CPO has given us, I suppose this is one of the less convincing ones, even though I guess it might be worth a listen by those with a special interest in operas of the period (or biographical interest in the composer). The sound is generally fine if a little woolly.