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Gluck La Clemenza di Tito Gluck's La Clemenza of 1752 deserved its belated British premiere, and is as stage-worthy as Mozart's, though the music is not yet quite top rank Gluck. Same story, very similar text and in concert performance at St John's given by Nigel Robson and five sopranos. Arlene Rolph was secure from the beginning, but the others didn't quite find form and their voices until the second half, with some rought moments from Tito and squally top notes from the conspiratorial aspiring Empress, Vitellia. All round improvement in the second half with each singer making his/her mark, but no attempt at semi-staging, which this company has done memorably in churches in the past. Longuers and drooping tension during the lengthy recitativo secco exchanges ("a quick succession of notes having little melodic character and serving only to advance the action") - the situations were summarised in the notes, with translations of the arias, so in concert they might have been cut to advantage?* It was a long hot evening at St John's for non-Italian speakers - 3 and a quarter hrs with one interval. The authentic brass was, as they say, challenged by Gluck - reminding older concert goers of the days when you didn't expect to get through a Beethoven symphony without the (valved) horns cracking. An opera worth having 'collected' and a reminder that libretti were often set by many composers besides the one we all know. There seems to be no recording, but Bartoli has a couple of arias in her Gluck CD. * - - One solution for modern audiences at Baroque operas is to render the recitatives, which contain most of the narrative action, in English, and retain Italian for the arias. This was highly successful at a performance of Alcina by the West Australian Opera - - |