Since his first solo CD was launched in 2004, Franco Fagioli has been acclaimed as one among opera’s best countertenors, a particular class for classical “guys who sing excessive”—to paraphrase the nifty Instagram deal with of Australian countertenor David Hansen. In late July, due to Andrew Ousley’s all the time stunning arts group Dying of Classical, the Argentina-born Fagioli lastly made his Huge Apple debut accompanied by L’Orchestre de L’Opéra Royal, the resident ensemble of the Château de Versailles, at L’Alliance New York.
Fagioli’s live performance, drawn from his most up-to-date CD, The Final Castrato: Arias for Velluti, adopted the orchestra’s U.S. debut every week earlier with a staging of Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment on the Pageant Napa Valley. In charming if rambling remarks earlier than the New York Metropolis live performance, Tatiana Brandt Copeland, proprietor and president of the tour’s main sponsor Bouchaine Vineyards, recounted the outstanding circumstances that made the Versailles group’s appearances attainable. I’m certain Copeland, Ousley and their colleagues had been vastly relieved that each the California opera and New York live performance transpired with out a hitch, particularly as a number of NYC-area festivals have not too long ago needed to scramble to deal with main cancellations as a result of blocking of visas for European artists.
Previous to their full-length live performance at Florence Gould Corridor, Fagioli and the orchestra, led by violinist Stefan Plewniak, gave a sneak preview at Dying of Classical’s “The Affair of the Poisons,” a multi-media romp on the Printemps division retailer that not too long ago opened in Manhattan’s Monetary District. They carried out Arsace’s entrance scena from Gioachino Rossini’s Semiramide, a quantity that doesn’t seem on the Velluti CD however neatly matches in with the singer’s uncommon preoccupation with uncommon nineteenth-century bel canto.
Although conventional opera audiences should still discover countertenor singing uncommon, pop music followers for years have eagerly embraced performers from Frankie Valli to the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson to Prince who exploited their excessive falsetto ranges.
Although classical countertenors have existed for years, the lasting trendy revival started in earnest within the mid-twentieth century with the rise of Alfred Deller in England and Russell Oberlin within the U.S. These males and their successors primarily carried out music from the seventeenth and 18th Centuries, however ultimately modern composers started to put in writing music for them with rising frequency. For instance, of the twenty-first-century operas carried out by the Metropolitan Opera, Nico Muhly’s Marnie, Kevin Places’s The Hours, Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice and Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel embrace a countertenor function, as does this season’s El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego by Gabriela Lena Frank.
Nonetheless, like most countertenors, a lot of the music repeatedly carried out by Fagioli was initially written for castrati, males who after they had been boys had been castrated to protect their excessive voices. As he has an particularly wide selection, he sings music written for each soprano and alto castrati. A couple of turned superstars together with three who’ve been significantly related to Fagioli: Caffarelli (his solo CD of arias premiered by this legendary singer is spectacular!), Carestini and Farinelli. He had a star-making success, particularly, with Carestini’s function of Arbace in Leonardo Vinci’s Artaserse whose most well-known aria he concluded with an astonishing excessive D-flat!
When he first carried out the alto function of Aci in Nicola Porpora’s Polifemo in 2013, one can hear somebody shout “Farinelli” after his hypnotic rendition of the celebrated aria “Alto Giove!”
Although they had been almost unnoticeable throughout his New York live performance, Fagioli has typically exhibited a number of mannerisms—contorted facial expressions and closely aspirated “machine-gun” coloratura—that remind lots of Cecilia Bartoli. Although the pair have hardly ever appeared collectively, he did have one among his first massive opera successes in a 2005 Zurich Giulio Cesare when he was Cesare to her Cleopatra.
Because the eighteenth century wore on, the observe of castration for musical ends misplaced favor; nonetheless, Fagioli has been uniquely within the few nineteenth-century operas written with a castrato in thoughts. As baroque works conditioned audiences to anticipate heroes with excessive voices, later composers peopled their operas with trouser roles through which the hero was carried out by a feminine as in Rossini’s Tancredi and Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti ed I Montecchi. Nonetheless, there nonetheless had been a couple of late castrato operas together with Aureliano in Palmira by Rossini and Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Il Crociato in Egitto, each automobiles of Giovanni Battista Velluti who was castrated for medical relatively than musical causes.
Although the CD known as The Final Castrato, some outlived Velluti who died in 1861. For instance, Alessandro Moreschi, the one castrato whose voice was recorded, lived till 1922.
Although I’ve heard some current broadcasts through which Fagioli didn’t all the time sound his finest, he was in excellent kind for his long-overdue New York debut that was not, as some have claimed, his first North American look. Fifteen years in the past, he sang the title function in Cavalli’s Giasone with the Chicago Opera Theater. Although his voice initially sounded small and heavy as he started an aria from Giuseppe Nicolini’s Traiano in Dacia, he shortly discovered his footing after which captivated his rapt viewers with grandly impassioned renditions of prolonged scenes from Paolo Bonfichi’s Attila and Carlo Magno, one other Nicolini work.
Fagioli differs from many different countertenors as he purposely dives with startling immediacy into his chest register. He virtually seamlessly negotiates extravagant runs from these penetrating low notes to his dizzying highest. He disdains dramatic arm gestures, preferring to imbue Velluti’s arias with a haunting quiet depth. Whereas he doesn’t possess the invitingly mellifluous countertenor voice of, say, Max Emanuel Cencic or Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, he attracts within the listener with an intently suave bravura that each touches and dazzles us.
Sadly, the New York live performance let each Fagioli and his viewers down by offering solely a single-sheet program that merely listed the titles of the arias: no texts, projected titles and even synopses to determine the just about unknown vocal works. A lot of the excerpts Fagioli carried out adopted an identical kind: a brief orchestral introduction resulting in an animated recitative, adopted by a plaintive cavatina. After it, there could be extra agitated recitative resulting in an up-tempo cabaletta that includes demanding coloratura and a show-stopping end. However the particulars of every remained a thriller. Even these like me who previewed by way of a streaming service the scena from Mercadante’s Andronico bought entry to only the music: one needed to have bought the Château de Versailles CD to get all the small print.
Plewniak and his full of life, younger thirty-one-member orchestra bubbled with pleasure of their vivid overtures by Rossini and Niccolò Zingarelli, whose Giulietta e Romeo the orchestra and conductor have recorded with Fagioli as Romeo. Violinist Plewniak briefly grabbed the highlight with a spectacularly virtuosic Polonaise from Pierre Rode’s First Violin Concerto.
Fagioli’s encore gave everybody a soupçon of his Printemps look: the fiendishly florid Semiramide cabaletta, which he tossed off with virtually impudent facility. Let’s hope he returns quickly, as he stays one of the thrilling and transferring of the various countertenors in opera right now.
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