59.00 PLN

CD:

Nr kat.: GEMM9269
Label  : Pearl

EUGENIA BURZIO The true dramatic soprano voice is a rara avis. In any age they tend to be few and far between, and more highly valued for that. A fiery temperament and impassioned delivery are invariably a sine qua non of her stage persona. But here also is the cross she must bear, for, shorn of her impact in the theatre, her recordings may convey only a partial picture. Surprisingly often, however, the greatest singers have succeeded in capturing the searing intensity of their interpretations on disc, such that their personality fair leaps out of the groove at the listener, leaving the rest to the imagination. One of the most remarkable dramatic sopranos was Eugenia Burzio, outstanding even in a golden age of such voices. Her contemporaries during the first decade of this century, active in Italy alone, included Maria De Macchi, Salomea Kruszelnicka, Celestina Boninsegna, Giannina Russ, Felia Litvinne, Ester Mazzoleni and the great Hariclea Darclee. Biographies of some great singers are frequently rags-toriches stories. However, not in Burzio's case. She was born into a cultured, middle-class family in Poirino, Turin, on 20 June 1879 (one source gives 1872). The child's obvious musical talent was encouraged and she studied violin and piano. She was also a talented painter. At the age of nine she appeared in public as a violinist, but her interest shifted towards singing when a promising soprano voice gradually developed. She studied at Milan Conservatoire with Maestri Aversa and Guagni-Benvenuti. Her operatic debut took place in 1899 at the Teatro Vittorio Emanuele in Turin (not at the more important Regio) in Cavalleria Rusticana. Details of the earliest years of her career are somewhat sketchy and ill-documented, but within a short space of years she had burst upon the scene like a fiery rocket. She soon carved out a niche of the most demanding of soprano roles: among them Aida, Santuzza, Tosca, Maddalena, Fedora, Norma, Wally. The first important appearances traced were in Southern Italy at the beginning of 1903, when in January she sang for the first time at the Teatro Bellini, Catania, as Desdemona to the Otello of Cardinali and Tosca to the Cavaradossi of Andreini: Carobbi was the baritone for both operas. In February she was Feodora to Fernando De Lucia's Loris, Fratoddi's De Seriex and Casini's Olga. After Catania she made her debut at the Massimo, Palermo, in April and May of 1904, singing in Gioconda, which she had taken over from Amelia Pinto, Cavalleria Rusticana and in a now-forgotten curiosfty, Nel Sempione of Luigi Constantino, the part of Nena. Our subject next visited South America, as part of a touring company, appearing at the Teatro Santana, Sao Paulo in October 1904 as their first Maddalena in Andrea Chenier, their first Marguerite in La Damnation de Faust, Aida, Un Ballo in Maschera, Tosca and La Gioconda. Her partners were the tenors Giovanni Zenatello and Jose Palet, the baritones Francesco Maria Bonini and Roussel and the now-forgotten mezzo Stefania Collamarini. They journeyed also to Rio. Yet despite her great success, this was her sole season at Sao Paulo. It was not long before she had conquered the hallowed halls of La Scala where, in the 1905/06 season, she practically domi- nated the spinto soprano roles. Her debut took place in late December 1905 in Loreley during a run initiated by Lucia Crestani, with Stracciari and Zenatello. She was then La Scala's first Katiusha in Alfano's Risurrezione (following its premiere in Turin on 30 November, 1904), with Piero Schiavazzi, Eleanora de Cisneros and Straceiari on 7 March 1906. After repeating her Loreley on 18 April, she participated in Franchetti's Figlia di Jorio on 22 April, with a sensational cast: Zenatello, Giraldoni, De Cisneros and Didur; Mugnone conducted. Her success was immediate, and she returned for the 1907 season singing in casts that are a record collector's dream and all conducted by Toscanini: La Gioconda (15 January) with Bruno, Amato, De Angelis, Zenatello and Petri; Aida (28 February) with Zenatello, Gay, De Angelis; La Wally (3 March) with Icilio Calleja, Arnato and De Angelis: and Cav-alleria Rusticana with Anselmi, Bruno and Romboli. She would appear again in the 1908 season, but only as Gioconda. Back in South America Burzio appeared in the second season of the Colon, Buenos Aires, 1909, but in one dominated by Hariclea Darclee, who was a great favourite there. She appeared in her three most famous roles: Gioconda, Aida and Santuzza. Constantino was her tenor partner and Ruffo, De Luca and Novelli were her baritone partners respectively. Again, somehow, she never reappeared after this one season. The world premiere of La Fanciulla del West took place at the Met on 10 December, 1910 with Emmy Destinn as Minnie. The part gave Burzio one of the roles for which she became famous throughout Italy. The gun-slinging, bible-toting, cowgirl consumed with love might have been written for Burzio, so perfectly did it suit her. She sang in the Italian premiere on 12 June 1911 at the Costanzi, in Rome, with Amato (the original Rance), Bassi and, again with Toscanini (its original conductor) on the podium. These performances represent the apogee of her career and she sang the role in many important theatres in Italy, among them the Regio, Turin (1911) and in Naples (1913). If her career reached its zenith with her assumption of Minnie, the role also marks a turning point. Somehow after 1911/12 the star began to dwindle, slowly but perceptibly. Perhaps the role took its toll: Minnie dominates the stage for a large part of the opera and requires all the stamina a singer can muster. Some reports spoke of debilitating stage fright. For whatever reason Burzio's appearances became slowly more sporadic. There was still the 1911/12 season at La Scala (after her first Minnies), in which she sang Saffo and Armide of Gluck, and the 1912/13 season, in which she sang Norma, but after that she appeared at La Scala only once more, in Loreley, on 5 February, 1915, and that was substituting for (an ailing?) Kruszelnicka. The 1913 season in Naples, where she sang for the first time, was still to come (Minnie, Wally and Fleana in a Leoncavallo curiosity, Gli Zingari), but she did not return there. After all this time we can but speculate what happened to her career. Certainly the Columbias show her still in sumptuous voice. But her appearances became fewer and fewer. In 1916 she toured among various Italian theatres in another forgotten opera by Leoncavallo, Mamek, in the role of Delio. There is a review of one of these performances, in Genoa on 27 April 1916, in the Genoese newspaper Secolo XIX. It hardly suggests any deterioration in her powers: Madame Burzio was new to this theatre. For us she was a revelation, both as singer and actress. She was born to the role of Delio, which she played with an expressive force, full of sentiment and rich in nuance. Burzio as a singer possesses a magnificent voice: a beautiful, clear timbre, limpid and sonorous with a variety of expressive power to depict every emotion. She can vary her singing to express the passion of the character. For this Burzio is a complete singer ... Perhaps she simply grew tired. An alternate outlet for her energies became available to her in 1916, when she was offered and accepted the post of editor of the newspaper Comoedia. Her last performances were in April 1919 at the Lirico of Milan in Ponchielli's Marion Delorme. She died in Milan at the early age of 42, on 18 May 1922, of renal disease. JOHN WILLIAMS Producer's note To Anglo-Saxon ears (like mine), reared on the crystalline purity of sopranos of the Marches, school and their contemporaries in French, German, English and American opera houses, the style of Italian dramatic sopranos at the beginning of the twentieth century came as something of a shock. "Squally", "tearing a passion to tatters" -these were only two of the epithets directed at singers such as Bellincioni, Carelli, Mazzoleni and Burzio. It has taken me many years to realise the virtues, as well as the defects, of their art. And while I still have reservations concerning the records of the first two of these ladies (surely their voices must have sounded better than this?). I now think that Burzio was a great singer: she must have been terrific in the theatre. Regarding the records, it seems that she was an inveterate transposer. By my reckoning at least 12 of the 21 tracks on this CD are transposed down by a semitone (I don't know about Saffo or Zulma). The evidence for this lies chiefly in her vocal quality; many of the items, if played to score pitch, produce shrill, thin, white top notes-quite out of keeping with her normal rich tones. Consistency of playing speeds within recording sessions also seems to confirrri my decisions - but, of course, it's all a matter of opinion! We cannot date Burzio's Columbia records with any accuracy -very little documentation for this company has survived. **** (4 gwiazdki) A Glimpse of a Bygone Age, April 7, 2001 Reviewer: An Amazon.com Customer from West New York, NJ Eugenia Burzio was one of the superstars of the opera world at the turn of the century. Burzio debuted in 1899 and continued to perform until 1919. Known for her hot temper, Burzio was one of the few singers to have stood up to Arturo Toscanini. She sang at La Scala and other great houses in Italy and South America; she performed alongside some of the great singers of the day. The excerpts on this CD date from as early as 1905 and as late as 1913. That any recordings of such a long-ago artist survive is remarkable, and we are certainly privileged to have such a thrilling glimpse of a bygone era available to us. As with most recordings of this antiquity, the first listen is a bit off-putting. The sound is a trifle muffled, and the continual hiss an pop of the Victrola needle is audible. However, as a criticism this is like complaining the Wright Brothers' plane did not have enough seats in first class. We can hardly expect our standard of recording quality to have existed ninety or more years ago. Therefore, there is a degree to which we must admit that we are getting only a shadowy idea of what the great diva must have sounded like in performance. In addition to recording technology, singing was a different art at the turn of the century. Burzio's career came after the bel canto operas of Bellini and Donizetti had largely disappeared, and any singer capable of singing them up to the standards of those composers' times would have been a rara avis, indeed. The drama in opera had superceded the pure art of singing, and the verismo movement was in full force. Thus, her performances of excerpts from Norma and Pacini's Saffo are not what we who were raised on Callas, Sutherland, and Caballe might expect. But Burzio was a true dramatic soprano, a vocal ancestress of Milanov, or perhaps even Tebaldi. To hold her interpretations of these works to the standards of these coloratura specialists would not be appropriate. As to the sound, the record needle and the lack of crispness actually became comforting, creating a warm, nostalgic feeling once I acclimated to it, and eventually sounded quite natural to me. Thus, my enjoyment of this recording came only after working to put aside a certain degree of prejudice created by past listening experience. The effort was well worth it. Burzio's hot-blooded interpretations of these arias are what serious opera is all about. Every piece is sung with great feeling and pathos. Burzio's tone, if we are to judge by this recording, was round and very rich, as solid in the chest register as in the high notes. She was capable of some beautiful pianissimos when the situation demanded it, but in general, subtlety and restraint were not her approach to drama. Gasps of desperation, glottal noises, sobs interpolated between notes, and heavy rubato are devices she took (perhaps extreme) liberties with. Her "Oh patria mia" from Aida is a perfect example. Her Norma excerpts, while they probably would make the fastidious Bellini shiver in his grave, are nonetheless intensely moving and charged with emotion. I was enthralled with the Act IV duet from Trovatore "Mira di acerbe lagrime", with an unidentified baritone as DiLuna, in which her desperate pleading is both heartfelt and heartrending. Equally thrilling is her impassioned interpretation of "Ma dall'arido stello" from Un Ballo in Maschera. She is at her most convincing in her two brief arias from Romano's Zulma, a verismo work, which music allows her to exercise her powerful voice and acting ability to their fullest. The liner notes could have been more detailed, as there is only a short biographical essay and there is no information about the operas represented on the disc. No translations, or even Italian libretti, are included. In the case of Zulma and Pacini's Saffo, this would be helpful to most listeners. This recording is an acquired taste, but it continues to delight me more and more with each time I listen, and each hearing reveals something new.