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Reviewer: Donald
R. Vroon This is Gardiner’s second recording of Semele. The first was in 1981 and was reviewed by John Barker with John Nelson’s DG recording in November/December 1993. The earlier Gardiner recording had an all-English cast; this one has two Italians in the cast, and one (the bass) is impossible to understand. He sounds nasal and muffled. Sam Ramey (Nelson) is way ahead of him in voice and characterization. The countertenor here also doesn’t quite measure up; at least twice he is out of his range and sounds it. The person who sings Juno and Ino is French, and I can’t understand what she is singing without looking at the texts. She does roll her Rs and sound plenty angry sometimes—
makes Juno a bit of a wicked
witch. It doesn’t help that in all these instances the tempos seem too fast.
True, that is not literally so. John Nelson’s tempos are often just as fast.
But Nelson is expressive, and Gardiner is not. Nelson’s English Chamber
Orchestra sounds very beautiful compared to these period instruments—and a
large part of it is expressive dynamics. The sound of Gardiner’s period
strings can be tinny (I cringe in the final sinfonia), but usually it isn’t
objectionable. They just don’t seem expressive. Sorry to keep coming back to
one word, but I think “not expressive enough” sums up what I thought about
this recording (and a friend who listened with me—who really loves Semele).
Nelson’s chorus also sounds better. The chorus plays a huge part in this. It
was called, after all, an oratorio rather than an opera—though it has been
staged.
I have heard two actual
performances of Semele: Nelson at Carnegie Hall (same basic cast as his
recording) and Harry Bicket and his English Concert in Ann Arbor in the
spring of 2019. Add in the recordings, and I think I know the piece quite
well and like it almost as much as John Barker did. By the way, Gardiner
still does not give us as much as Nelson did. Act I is about 39 minutes
here; Nelson is 62—and actual times in each piece are similar. The cut music
in Act I includes the essential ‘Morning Lark’ aria where we get to know
Semele. Endless Pleasure, Endless Love’ is not sung by Semele, as it usually
is. The plot summary here assigns it to Semele, but the notes say that the
original Congreve libretto did not. But Handel did, so why doesn’t Gardiner?
It fits Semele’s character to gloat like that. Louise Alder is a wonderful
Semele—that is, the voice is beautiful, the singing high-class. Kathleen
Battle was more “into” the character in the Nelson recording—again, more
expression. Maybe this singer just doesn’t have the ego and vanity to sound
totally convincing in ‘Myself I do Adore’. The countertenor (Athemas) is
generally OK; he essentially disappears after Act 1, but he sings a lot
there. I really like the voice and expression of the Jupiter here; but he
has trouble with the word “into”, which occurs often in his famous aria,
‘Where’ere You Walk’. It’s as if to pronounce the vowel he has to twist his
mouth, which distorts the sound. He does finally get it right the last time
he sings it. In general he sounds very warm for a tenor; he reminds me of
Martyn Hill. By the way, we are told on the sleeve that this was “recorded in front of a live audience”. Well, I don’t have any recordings made in front of a dead audience. And the occasional titters from the London audience are not edifying. We are also told that this group performed it in “iconic venues” all over Europe. The Semele singer is called a “passionate recitalist”. How hard it is today for writers to avoid dumb clichés!
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