Search - Franco Alfano, Maurizio Arena, Turin RAI Orchestra :: Franco Alfano: Cyrano de Bergerac

Philosopher and scientist, poet, musician, duellist--tenor

L. E. Cantrell | Vancouver, British Columbia Canada | 09/15/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Source: Live performance, recorded at Turin in September 1975.



Sound: Opera d'Oro recordings are always a crap shoot with regard to sound quality. This is one of their better efforts. The audience is quite small and extremely disciplined. There are no stage noises. I presume, therefore, that this is a performance recorded for broadcast.



Text: The five act structure of Edmond Rostand's long and stately verse play (322 pages for Brian Hooker's famous English translation) has been trimmed to four acts, three of them quite brief, in a paraphrase by Henri Cain.



Format: Disc 1, Acts 1 and 2, 17 tracks, 71:10. Disc 2, Acts 3 and 4, 12 tracks, 51:49.



Documentation: No libretto. Short essay on the opera. Brief synopsis of plot by act, unkeyed to the track list. The track list shows timings but offers no indications about who is singing. The cover illustration depicts a gentleman of authorial bearing and a appropriately soaring shnozz:"Tis a rock--a crag--a cape. A cape? say rather a peninsula." However, unless I am sadly mistaken, he is not the 17th Century literary swordsman, Hercule-Savinien De Cyrano de Bergerac, but rather the 16th Century humanist, Erasmus. This is not the most misleading thing in Od'O's documentation.



Franco Alfano's "Cyrano" had its premiere in Rome in January 1936 under the baton of Tullio Serafin.



This recording presents the work of an Italian composer, one famously identified with Puccini. It was recorded in Italy with an Italian orchestra and an Italian conductor. It's cast is largely Italian, and among them no obviously French name appears. Silly me, I assumed that the opera would be sung in Italian. It turned out to be in French, using the text that opened in Paris one week after the premiere in Rome. This is all the more surprising, as the individual recorded tracks are identified in Italian.



Alfano's "Cyrano," Korngold's "Die Tote Stadt" and Barber's "Vanessa," are three great 20th Century operas that have never quite managed to claw their way into the ranks of the standard repertory. Of these, "Cyrano" may be the most accessible. It's story is well-known and straight-forward. It's music is largely, indeed, resolutely diatonic. It's scoring is lush--and then some! The short Fourth Act has been criticized for being too much of a dying fall, for not catching the final triumph snatched out of lifelong tragedy: "My . . . white . . . plume." For my part, I would like to have a stronger ending (as with "Turandot"), but I can live with what we are given. The one significant failing of all the three highly admirable operas is their collective failure to provide a simple, grinder organ tune that seizes the hearts and minds of the audience, forcing them to whistle it even as they belly up to the bar during the intermission, the sort of thing that was so prodigally provided by Puccini or Verdi, time after time.



The singers on this recording are competent and intelligent. I think Olivia Stapp as Roxane (or Rossana, as she is Italianized here) is a little too hard-edged, but that is a matter of personal taste. On the whole, the performances of the singers are admirable, without being truly memorable. They are good enough to make me wonder what singers with the stature of Bergonzi, say, or Tebaldi might have achieved with Cyrano and Roxane.



This is a good performance of a very good opera-good enough to make me want to search out a copy of Alfano's earlier and, it is said, even more lush, "Risurrezione".



Well worth five stars."

No-frills Gasconade

zaranda | Winnetka, CA United States | 06/30/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"If one's conception of Rostand's play derives exclusively from Brian Hooker's decorative translation or from Jose Ferrer's elegant, luxuriously articulated, 1950 film based on it, this music may prove a difficult fit. The mark of late, hard-edged Puccini is indelibly upon it. There are no concessions to Gounod/Meyerbeer gavotte, gigue, and oom-pah, not even in the Theater or Pastry Shop scenes. The Paris evoked is never the sweetly sentimental city of `Boheme' or `Rondine', but rather the grim, dank venue of `Tabarro'--obligatory Gallicism left to the unmistakable `Pelleas' influence here and there.

If one is willing to re-think the whole business, however, Alfano's version does have its appeal, especially the Garden/Balcony Scene where Cyrano, with convincing, manic dynamism tears away momentarily from a lifetime of self-repression and fear of ridicule. The style in this is, unsurprisingly, very much Calaf/Turandot; the shade of Puccini's final work rises again affectingly at the beginning of Act III at the Front.The windfall of this live recording is the singing of the three principals. William Johns never flags in the demanding, dramatic, title role; Olivia Stapp as Roxanne, no shrinking ninny ingénue in this adaptation, but a full figured, high-voltage Heroine; Antonio Blancas as De Guiche; they are simply brilliant, outstanding, a festa of bravura vocalism."

Cyrano -- a true heldentenor role

R. B. Collins | Alexandria, VA | 01/23/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This opera deserves to be heard, and I rejoice that this performance has been made available on CD, especially as a comparison with the more recent production in Kiel, Germany.



The sound in this production is alas thin and dated, which is a pity, as the performances generally deserve better, and the true beauty of this opera lies in the total ensemble of orchestral and vocal color. I suspect the recording is only a pale reflection of the actual performance. William Johns here has a true heldentenor voice, a voice with weight and yet a ringing upper register, and as such, is an excellent choice for the role of Cyrano. In contrast to the more recent German production, he gives a more powerfully "verismo" interpretation, especially in the balcony scene and at the very end, as Cyrano is dying. Indeed, it is solely for one tiny detail of this that I have anything to fault his performance with - he basically dies two syllables too soon, and Cyrano's last word, "panache", is almost totally obscured, which seems unfair! Olivia Stapp as Roxane is a forceful dramatic soprano; a little more warmth and sweetness would have been welcome. Seeing her picture on the internet leads me to believe, though, that she genuinely looked the part of the beautiful Roxane and was probably very effective onstage. I have a quibble with her performance of one of the dramatic high points of the opera: I think that the tempo of her aria "Je lisais, je relisais" in the third act is far too slow to allow it to be sung well or to give it the dramatic effect it needs. The other roles in the opera are sung nicely.



This production is billed as a live performance in Turin in 1975, but there are virtually no stage sounds, other than two sticks hitting each other during the duel at the beginning, and a very small popgun in the battlefield scene, which diminishes the dramatic effect. The sketchy information in the accompanying literature lead one to believe the performance is in Italian, but instead it is in the original French. The pronunciation is distinctly Italianate, with r's rolled with enthusiasm, and some difficulties with the French nasal sounds. On the whole, though, the French is more understandable than in the German production, which is fine for French speakers only, as there is no libretto.



The strength of this production is William Johns's voice and performance, especially in the balcony scene, and for this reason I would recommend this recording to all diehard Cyrano fans, even though the whole does not satisfy quite as much as the German production, in part because of the older sound, but also because of the timing and tempi which just don't work quite as well. Curiously enough, though, despite the differences in tempi, the two performances finish within a minute of each other in length. My suggestion would be to get both, especially so you can have a copy of the libretto.





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