Shirley and Steadily
Click to view"It is well known that Verdi rehearsed the murder duet 151 times before the first performance; that he wanted it to be more discourse than song. It is also well known (perhaps too freely and irresponsibly known in some quarters) that he wanted Lady, as he unwittingly called her, to possess a harsh, stifled dark voice. Better a soprano with no voice at all, he opined, than one who sand well. By well, of course, he meant prettily. He wanted no Jenny Lind fluttering in this gloomy arbour. Rysanek sings well, but retains a dramatic presence, as does Nilsson (formidably so). Souliotis sings hardly at all. Verrett, though, is the true, smokey-toned mezzo, the most formidable and absorbing Lady Macbeth since Callas. Here, at last, in the sleepwalking scene is an interpretation to set beside Callas's. There is the same steady pulse, the same mastery of dramatic inflection. Perhaps the interpretation is not as utterly personal as Callas's, but it is powerfully complete none the less. In the perfumes of Arabia passage Rysanek found a Desdemona-like pathos in the music (there is so much to find!). Significantly, Verrett finds it too, later, on the word "balsami", conjuring salving tones such as we have earlier at the line "A loro un requiem, l'eternita" in a beautifully shaped and shaded account of "La luce langue". And although the final fil de voce must remain elusive, a thing for one's most private imaginings, I can report that this mezzo-soprano's high D flat is beautifully, securely there. Earlier the reading is formidable too: Verrett grand, proud, tigerish, capable of pity and disdain. Like Callas, Verrett gloriously reveals the point of the cranks and eddyings of the vocal line, showing Verdi mining riches out of a musical language which (to his persistent gaze) was far from spent. The haunted colloquy after the murder is full of distinguishing touches, declamation and pulse (the very metaphor of obsessive fear) thrillingly reconciled by both singers, with Abbado and his players spinning rhythms and flecking out wind harmonies with an imaginative brilliance that even Toscanini might have envied."