Artists
Album Info
Release Date: 2018Label: A.K. Müzik
1995. Leyla Gencer begins today, with the new year, her first commission as president of the International Festival of Istanbul: her country commits to her experience as singer and interpreter (as well as to her culture as musician, artistic director and teacher of interpretation coures) the imprint of a festival uniting the living fire of a western music with the East’s passion for beauty and philosophy. For concert and opera lovers, Leyla Gencer, forty years after beginning of her career, is one of today’s main figures of reference.Prima donna of a captivating tragic tone and voluptuous power of seduction, lady of the stage, vibrant interpreter with a capacity to bring words, both dramatic and poetic, to life in a direct and moving communication, with a noble and natural speech. She represents the end result of respectful updating process which has brought down to the fourth wall also in the Opera Theatre, with the care she puts into both the breathing and the words, as well as to the imperceptible undertone of anguish leading up to tragedy; with her staring into space at the hallucinary visions of her heroines; her crossing the limelight, arms outstretcehd, to come closer to the audience, to render to each one the “estremo, estremo pianto” of Alceste, or Antonina, desperately pleading “toglietemi la vita”. She has reflected in opera, almost unknowingly, the sum of critical and intellectual awareness, as well as philological accuracy, required by today’s operistic reading, and we find this, with thrilled recogntion, in her interpretations. She is, in fact, an involuntary intellectual, as far as taste, manners and high philosophical requirements have always and in all places united an élite of strong and refined artists, even outside field of music, from Riccardo Bacchelli to Denis McSmith, from Luchino Visconti to Fedele d’Amico, from the compagnia dei Giovani of De Lullo, Valli and Pizzi to Strehler.This fascinating wealth of characters, personalities, affections, psychological introspections, fulminating intuitions, personalised knowledge of vocal styles- has it been gained progressively through contact with people and environments, or was it an atavic richness, a dormant artistic gift, awakened with encounters and events?
1954. Leyla Gencer, young Turkish singer, makes her debut in an Italian theatre of mythical tradition, the San Carlo of Naples. Shyly, we go back in time- to be charmed by te theatres of the early ‘50’s, to breath in the dark the expectation, and the surprise, of a debut. We can turn the knob of the old radiophonic instruments, when the vocal Concerts and te MARTINI and ROSSI Concerts offered the invention of programmes, the fragrance of the Rai Symphonic Orchestras, the presence of opera stars and undiscovered talent. The technics and the conservation of documents, like the Rai tapes, allows us to confront the question 40 years back, and to answer with the disc.
So here we are at San Carlo of Naples, on February 11th., 1954, for the debut of Leyla Gencer, protagonist of “Madame Butterfly”. The Theatre Archives return to us the live recording on wire, with its characteristic soundwave recording, the orchestra in one dense block, the voices far from the single fixed microphone and moving around rhe stage. But this subtle Gencer, with eruptive gestures and a young, expresive face now lit up, now quivering with tears, is something marvellous. She wins the favour of the ‘Tebaldian’ audience of San Carlo, who immediately call for, and receive, the encore of “Un bel di vdremo”. Romano in the prompter’s box is weeping; Pasqaule di Costanzo, the Supervisor who spotted her at her first audition, is rejoicing. She gives out an extraordinary freshness of voice and softness of singing, a natural and logical phrasing, all the colours of emotion, the continual fluctuation of thoughts and images, as well as the flowing continuity which links anguish and certainly, pride and devotion to love ‘piannissimo’ nuances and violent outbursts. From the wise Maestro Gabriele Santini this prehensile beginner may have learned confidence of style and continuity, but the absolute conception of character, the emotional tangle whch causes the audience to weep, and the elegant and noble measure by which it is sealed in the music are her own riches.
We would have liked to hear all of the young Gencer, but much is missing, like the “Cavalleria Rusticana” at the Arena Flegrea (July, 1953) with which Di Costanzo wanted to try out the young singer, and which led to her future contracts at the San Carlo. We do have, however, “Eugen Oneghin”, also at the San Carlo of Naples (March 17th., 1954), and also a live recording on wire. It marks the important meeting with Tullio Serafin, a maestro both patient and communicative in motivating the logic of music, able to activate the potential qualities, and to bind securely in interpretative lines the young singer’s intensity and responsiveness, as well as warn her against and protect her from routine models and temptations. In a cast of illustrious opera stars, with Gino Bechi(Oneghin), Italo Tajo, and the even younger Giuseppe Campora, Gencer’ young Tatiana sings a song of yet passionate, with the decisive tragic stature of one who knows how to dismisss passion with the superiority of pride and resignation, in the duet of the last act with Oneghin.
During the performances; Serafin works on the project of a “Traviata” with the Violetta of a thousand souls, to be launched in Palermo. Together with “Madame Butterfly” and “Tosca”, La Traviata was to become the young Gencer’s battlehorse: from Palermo (February’55) to Trieste, Reggio Emilia (’56), Ankara and Warsaw(’56) as far as Vienna (’57)...There is however, no live recording of it: there remains only a dazzling page in the Concert of arias racorded for Cetra with the Rai Symphonic Orchestra of Torino, directed by Arturo Basile(’55-’56). But the rich San Carlo of Naples archives offer a “Tosca” which is enchantingly witch-like, anxious, jealous: faith in her “Vissi d’arte” (January 2st., 1955, directed by Vincenzo bellezza) is what is to give passionate truth and tension to the whole of Leyla’s artistic life.
She had already sung “Tosca” in Turkey, for her debut (Ankara, 1952), with Bergamask director Adolfo Camozzo, so that Leyla Gencer arrived well-prepared from sophisticated Turkey of the ‘50’s, with strong French, German and above all Italian directives, with maestros Giannina Arangi Lombardi and Apollo Granforte, a European technique of discipline and tradition, and the power of her mysterious energy.
In 40 years of career the opera titles and characters accumulated by Leyla Gencer number almost 80. Her debuts, moreover, were already indicative of a prodigious versatility, as we observe from the programmes, and the full results, of the first notable Rai concerts.We do not have the first radiophonic appearance (Rome, July ’53) with melodies by Fauré and Duparc accompanied by pianist Giorgio Favaretto, one of his already muchloved “worlds”. But the first concert with an orchestra directed by Arturo Basile at the Rai of Torino (in 1955, not conserved) produced the studio recordings for a record issued by Cetra: five arias recorded in two sessions, with the Rai Symphonic Orchestra of Torino, directed by Arturo Basile. From the first session (April, ’55) we have Verdi’s “Aida”: the aria “O’cieli azzurri”, with a high C “filato pianissimo” which aroused the enthusiasm of Victor de Sabata during the audition in his dressing room at La Scala in July, ’56, and the delightfully wild and regal responsiveness, as well as the sacredness of death, of an Aida to be sung by Leyla Gencer many more times at La Scala, at the Arena of Verona, and throughout the world. We listen to Violetta, the “Addio del passato” which caused Riccardo Muti, trying out different singers for his Scaliger “Traviata”, to give a start of surprise.We listen to the farewell of Catalani’s “Wall” (Ebben, ne andro’ lontana”) with the sorrowful naturality of decadentism and the impressionistic capacity to paint on with the voice space, light, image, distance. In the second recording session (June, ’56) we listen to a Leonora (recitative and aria “D’amor sull’ali rosee” from Verdi’s “Il Travatore”), where Leyla Gencer has already formed the romantic, epic and tragic recitative, and commits the heroic ideality of the romantic heroine and the human substance, anxious in word and expression, to the lyrical liberating of the voice, airy and luxurious. She commits herself , and love, to ethereal figurations, and to propolled lyrical phrases, seemingly endless and carried on extremely long breaths.
This is the Leonora by Verdi on this Cetra record(from “La Forza del Destino”, aria “Pace, mio Dio”), streteches to the full like a boat sail in a stormy sea, the phrasing of her entreaty, and the song trembles with the storms of soul and destiny. This is the opera which soon, in July, ’57, gencer was to sing triumphantly in the La Scala tour at Cologne.
The two MARTINI and ROSSI Concerts of those years (January 14th.,’57; February 10th., 58), both directed by Alfredo Simonetto, with the Rai Symphonic Orchestra of Torino, also served to fan the young Turkish singer’s talent for tragedy an virtuosic availability towards a receptiveness in the world of opera. Leyla can be radiantly Mozartian and contemptuously superior (from “Il Ratto dal Serraglio” aria “Tutte le torture”). She dissolves Puccinian prose in a song, and out of a pain like death gives birth to the miraculous transparency that Puccini wished for “Suor Angelica” (“Senza mamma”). The madness of “Lucia di Lammermoor”(“Il dolce suon...Ardon gli incensi”) shows her as ready Donizettian and predestined for discovery, with her frenzied raging, crystal clear percision and accentuation of a deep melancholy.
These are all paths which the theatre provides to enable us to enjoy the young Gencer, demonstrating the extent of her availability.
Finally, from the authors to the contemporary repertoire. The debut at La Scala takes place with the world premiere of “Dialoghi delle Carmelitane” by Francis Poulenc (January 26th., 1957). Leyla Gencer is Madame Lidoine, the new prioress, and we hear her in the aria in which she dismisses, and comforts, the sisters destined for the gallows:the first, flute-like, piannissimo, on one interminably long breath, and the first applause for Leyla Gencer from the audience of la Scala. Just prior to this (December 8th.,1956) at the San Carlo of Naples, she had interpreted “Monte Ivnor” by Federico Rocca (opera from 1936). From the third act we listen to the page “Non so, persecuted by the Turkish oppressors:the proverbial reactions of protest by Leyla Gencer to many initial contacts led to that superiority in the cathartic scrutiny of human suffering and of the uncertainity of life, which is what makes her unique. The two authors, Poulenc and Rocca, wrote her messages of gratitude, almost if they themselves had received truth more penetrating.
FRANCA CELLA