Angela Gheorghiu (soprano), Vincenzo Scalera (piano)
Signum Classics SIGCD780 50:25 mins
This year marks the centenary of Puccini’s death, providing an obvious marketing opportunity for record labels to showcase his works. The operas, of course, hardly need a helping hand, but his song output is surprisingly little known. This album presents a range of highly varied numbers, from ‘A te’, a charming parlour song composed in 1875 when Puccini was just 16, to the ‘Inno a Roma’, written to mark the end of the First World War. What different worlds these were, politically, socially and musically, yet the composer’s inherent lyric romanticism remains ever-present.
Puccini was, it seems, as keen a recycler as any of his musical forebears and the album allows the listener to play an amusing game of ‘name that tune’. The voice of Des Grieux pops up unexpectedly in a song about a father imagining meeting his daughter’s ghost. A simple song about sun and love takes on a sombre tone because we know its connotations from the La bohème Act III quartet.
Some songs were reused almost note-for-note; others merely hint at operas to come. Less familiar numbers, whether written as sacred or patriotic hymns or to celebrate the launch of a ship, are equally gorgeous. Angela Gheorghiu, sympathetically accompanied here by Vincenzo Scalera, is celebrated for her many Puccini interpretations on album and on stage. Here there are occasional intonation issues, particularly in the lower range or where a note is approached from below. But Gheorghiu’s dramatic conviction and the rich, blooming tone for which her voice is well known are still there in abundance, allowing her to give a meaningful and deeply expressive performance of this enjoyable body of music.
