VIVA VIVALDI! THE LOST OPERAS
Lirica Arts & Red Dot Baroque
School of the Arts Concert Hall
Saturday (14 January 2023), 7.30 pm
AN EVENING WITH MR JOE GREEN
Lirica Arts & Beatrice Lin (Piano)
Esplanade Recital Studio
Thursday (19 January 2023), 7.30 pm
This review was published in The Straits Times on 24 January 2023 with the title "Soprano showdown in two concerts celebrating Vivaldi and Verdi's music".
Everyone loves Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, four out of his 500 concertos, but did anyone know that the prolific Italian also wrote no less than 94 operas? Only 20 of these are ever performed, thus this sparkling 140-minute concert by Lirica Arts and Red Dot Baroque led by violinist Alan Choo was a revelation as virtually none of this music has ever been heard in Singapore.
Excerpts performed included numbers from operas such as Motezuma (composed 1733) and Orlando Furioso (1714), only discovered within the last twenty years. In these baroque arias, Vivaldi’s mythological characters come across as personable and relatable humans with real feelings and emotions, including pain, anguish and joy.
Soprano Joyce Lee Tung
Among the seven singers who performed, a battle royale emerged between two sopranos, locally-based Joyce Lee Tung and Taiwanese soprano Cheng Szu-Yun. Both were winners in high stakes on who could sing faster notes, hit higher pitches, emote and bring the house down. In Alma Oppressa (Soul Oppressed) from La Fida Ninfa, Lee projected vehemence in high registers, with furious running passages looking forward to coloratura divas of the future.
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| Soprano Cheng Szu-Yun |
Cheng lapped up virtuoso runs in Qual Guerriero (As A Warrior) from Bajazet with great relish, culminating with siren-like whoops, reminding listeners of Wagner’s valkyries of over a century later. Complementing their heroics were visually-impaired soprano Claire Teo, who echoed Lee in Zeffiretti, Che Sussurate (from Ercole Sul Termodonte), mezzo-soprano Rebecca Chellappah, tenor Jonathan Macpherson and baritone Martin Ng, founder-director of Lirica Arts.
Countertenor Chan Wei En
Some of the evening’s best moments were offered by countertenor Chan Wei En with two of the orchestra’s solo instrumentalists. Nuttakamon Supattranont’s trumpet lit up the stage in Lucio’s Aria from Tito Manlio while Rachel Ho’s flute was the sublime presence in Ruggiero’s Aria from Orlando Furioso. There were simply no dull moments.
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| Photo: PianoManiac |
Joe Green is none other than the Anglicised name of great Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, whose many operas are already well-known. But trust Lirica Arts to showcase familiar numbers from La Traviata and Il Trovatore alongside arias from Simon Boccanegra, The Sicilian Vespers, Don Carlo and Macbeth, not exactly household names. The close proximity of this concert with the Vivaldi gig was to harness the outsized talents of soprano Cheng, the evening’s undisputed star.
Verdi heroines are truly close to her heart, with no better example than Desdemona’s Willow Song and Ave Maria from Otello. Her beautiful voice brought a fragile pathos to the innocent and tragic figure whose premonition of death by her husband’s hand was simply chilling. Elena’s Bolero from The Sicilian Vespers, by contrast, was joyous and rhythmically charged by her ringing vibrato.
Her chemistry with baritone Martin Ng and tenor Jonathan Charles Tay was also clearly palpable in the highly dramatic Ciel! Mio Padre! (Heavens! My Father!) from Aida and waltz-inflected closing duet Parigi O Cara (Paris, My Dearest) from La Traviata respectively. The singers’ ability to listen to each other yet hold their own was the essence of operatic duets.
Pianist Beatrice Lin, a most sympathetic accompanist, was afforded a solo spotlight in a reduction of the Overture to The Force Of Destiny, which had the audience enraptured. In lieu of programme notes, host James Poole provided brief but coherent synopses of each number, which were helpful and much appreciated.
The evening closed with all three singers in Tace La Notte (The Night Is Silent) from Il Trovatore, a passionate romp which was so well received that its ecstatically-charged ending had to be encored. Viva Verdi, or Verdi lives, indeed.
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