Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)
Le Villi
Anna, daughter of Guglielmo: Anita Hartig (soprano)
Roberto, Anna’s fiancé: Kang Wang (tenor)
Guglielmo Wulf, forester: Boris Pinkhasovich (baritone)
Bavarian Radio Chorus
Munich Radio Orchestra/Ivan Repušić
rec. live, 11-13 October 2024, Prinzregententheater, Munich
BR-Klassik 900359 [60]
For many years the standard recommendation for this first of Puccini’ stage works has been the 1978 recording of the revised two-act version under Lorin Maazel with Renata Scotto, Plácido Domingo and Leo Nucci. It’s not perfect – despite her famed gift for investing the musical line with deep emotion, there was already something of a flap and a screech in Scotto’s top notes but there aren’t many of those and both the male leads are in excellent youthful voice; this is long before Nucci’s early decline into sliding and bleating. There have been a few other recordings of note; I like the live one in 1994 on the Nuova Era label with José Cura – another singer who too soon experienced severe vocal problems – and Sir Mark Elder recorded the first one-act version for Opera Rara with the two arias that were added to the revised two-act version as an appendix, but Maazel has held the field for nearly a half-century and a new digital account of Puccini’s revision is surely overdue; this concert performance commemorated the centenary of the composer’s death and as such is very recent.
The premiere met with great approval despite the weak libretto and a subject matter perhaps uncongenial to Puccini’s gifts; many of the melodies and orchestration effects are Puccinian tropes foreshadowing his later successes which remain in the repertoire. There were brief narratives accompanying the two Intermezzi explaining the leaps in the highly condensed plot; as the booklet puts it, “It is unclear whether the authors intended the verses of the interludes to be read by the audience or recited by a narrator.” Maazel had Tito Gobbi come out of retirement to recite them and the recording conducted by Bruno Aprea also has a narrator; this recording omits them although I would have thought it no trouble to included them for completeness and comprehension.
The gentle introduction already sounds like vintage Puccini and alerts us to the fact that the sound here is very open and reverberant – perhaps rather excessively so but it complements Ivan Repušić’s large-scale conception and delivery of what I have always thought of as essentially quite an intimate work – not that I am complaining, as I think his conducting is a complete success; he clearly has a real affinity with the genre. The opening waltz scene is very lively, predictive of similar dances in La rondine and we are immediately treated to a typically sentimental aria in Anna’s “Se come voi”, sung absolutely beautifully by Romanian soprano Anita Hartig, who has a large, rounded, lyric soprano with pure, bell-like top notes devoid of scratch or screech, an ideal vibrato and nice, solid, middle and low notes.
I was unacquainted with her and the baritone, but had just a few days previous to receiving this disc for review been alerted by a friend to the talents of Sino-Australian tenor Kang Wang and we had agreed that he had a beautiful voice and excellent musical instincts which just required him to find more ways of colouring his voice more expressively and variedly. What I really like about his voice is that it is a truly virile, masculine, slightly husky sound, not the mixed-falsetto croon that too often passes for an authentic tenor these days. He convincingly portrays the precursor to the thoughtless bad boy tenors such as Pinkerton who populate Puccini’s operas and still manage to maintain our sympathies by expressing remorse despite the selfishness of their previous behaviour. His exchange with Anna, promising fidelity, is touchingly delivered by both singers.
Repušić delivers the second “Witches’ Sabbath” Intermezzo thrillingly, with real elan. The Russian-Austrian baritone Boris Pinkhasovich has less to do but makes a dignified job of his blessing of the couple before Roberto’s departure to Sin City and sings his one, big “vengeance then repentance” aria opening Act II with real investment of passion, ending on a great top G (but watch that appoggiatura octave leap up to it, Boris, or you’ll end up like later Nucci, leaning into every top note with a slide of a fifth…). Wang seizes the opportunity of his showpiece aria “Torna ai felici dì” and despatches it powerfully. The macabre climax is splendidly attacked by the orchestra and chorus, providing a fitting conclusion to a really classy production. Revisiting the Aprea recording after this made me realise that both the sound and, in particular, his orchestra, were markedly inferior – not a problem encountered in the Maazel account, of course. Aprea’s has some faint coughing and much less “presence”, whereas this recording under review – presumably patched from rehearsal, as two dates are given – could easily be passed off as studio-made. Having said that, Aprea also has three first-rate principal singers in Nanà Gordaze, José Cura and Stefano Antonucci and I would not want to be without them.
Given the thickness of the booklet and the relative sparseness of the libretto, I would have thought that the Italian text at least could have been included in it as Nuova Era did, but an Italian libretto with German translation only can be downloaded using a QR code. That is my only gripe; otherwise this is as satisfying an account of the youthful Puccini’s first success as one could wish to encounter: vocally flawless, sonically ideal and masterfully conducted.
Ralph Moore
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