Radio New Zealand Concert network
Sunday 2nd of August 2009 at 3 - 6 pm
RESPIGHI: Marie Victoire, an opera in four acts
Marie de Lanjallay.................. Takesha Meshé Kizart
Maurice de Lanjallay............... Markus Brück
Clorivière................................ German Villar
Cloteau/du Fulgoet.................. Stephen Bronk
Kermarec............................... Jörn Schümann
Simon..................................... Simon Pauly
Lison Fleuriot.......................... Martina Welschenbach
Caracalla................................ Gregory Warren
La Marquise de Langlade........ Nicole Piccolomini
Le Marquis de Langlade......... Yosep Kang
La Novice.............................. Anna Fleischer
L’Abbé.................................. Thomas Bondelle
Le Mouton............................. Andrew Ashwin
Le Commissaire...................... Hyung-Wook Lee
Le Marquis de Grandchamp.... Krzysztof Szumanski
Le Vicomte............................. Nathan Myers
Le Chevalier........................... Tomislav Lucic
German Opera Chorus & Orch/Michail Jurowski (Berlin Radio)
At last, an opera by Ottorino Respighi (1879 - 1936; he went out as I came in). We know him as composer of tone-poems about Rome, and as arranger of early ('ancient') European music; but the only opera I had heard of was La Fiamma ('flame' or 'passion'), in which a seventeenth-century adulteress in Ravenna is condemned as a witch. Lamberto Gardelli produced a recording using Hungarian forces, and also recorded Semirama, about the same Mesopotamian queen as Rossini's Semiramide, who loves a man who is actually her own son.
Marie Victoire is set in the time of the French Revolution, and so it has a connection with Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites, and even includes a Carmelite novice who is going to the guillotine; also the idea of the servants lording it over their masters when the tables are turned in the new Republic, and its ruthless cruelty under Robespierre.
This work was ready for performance in 1913 (the libretto, in French, was based on the drama of the same name, both by Edmond Guiraud) but it did not emerge from oblivion till 2004, in Rome, and now in 2009, in Berlin.
Critics enthuse over the Afro-American soprano Takesha Meshé Kizart (born in Chicago) who sings the role of Marie, the heroine.
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