Never mind Italy, we started in Switzerland, the Overture to Rossini’s final opera, William Tell (featuring the man himself, his son, an apple and a crossbow), to a French libretto (the composer now living in Paris). The opening solo cellos lacked some charisma, the storm seemed somewhat restricted by the acoustic, then characterful woodwinds adorned the pastoral episode, and, finally, send in the cavalry to a galop – older readers will probably associate this smiler with The Lone Ranger (TV yonks ago), the performance now riding along with panache. Paris is the place for La bohème, Puccini rescuing a snippet of his student-written Capriccio sinfonico to get the stage-work underway. Otherwise this early orchestral work shows promise, Carlo Rizzi revealing a dramatic flair that Puccini would develop wholesale. Drama, too, in the Overture to The Sicilian Vespers, one of Verdi’s French-language operas, if somewhat overly-cushioned by the acoustic, as broadcast, ditto the final work, by Elgar. In 1903, he was hoping to escape the English winter, yet found conditions just as bad, or worse, in Alassio. The weather improved and Elgar had the kernel of a substantial orchestral work that became In the South, the premiere being in London during March 1904, Elgar conducting. Rizzi led an ebullient, nicely flexible, if somewhat impromptu account, with fine viola and horn solos in the dusky ‘canto popolare’.
French mezzo Virginie Verrez was magnetic in Berio’s imaginative Folk Songs (eleven in total, three being Italian), striking arrangements from 1964 for Cathy Berberian by a composer not given to the ordinary, here returning these ditties to their roots while also sophisticating them, Verrez attractively earthy and throaty, alive to the songs’ extemporised nature, and with pristine artistry for patter, sympathetically supported by Rizzi and WNO members – street musicians – the set emerging as vibrant World Music. In a further farewell to the “Italian Sun”, a misnomer for this concert, Respighi’s Il tramonto (The Sunset), setting an Italian translation of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem. Verrez was once again wonderful, hugging the words, their sentiments, and the music, scored just for strings (unlike his cinematic, widescreen, Roman Triptych), attentively accompanied.
Gioachino Rossini: Overture to William Tell
Giacomo Puccini: Capriccio sinfonico
Luciano Berio: Folk Songs*
Giuseppe Verdi: Overture to I vespri siciliani
Ottorino Respighi: Il tramonto*
Edward Elgar: Concert Overture, In the South (Alassio)
Virginie Verrez (mezzo)*
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002h7vz
Postscript: Only one Radio 3-broadcast Prom tomorrow (Monday Aug 25), the second CBeebies bash. Otherwise R3 is regurgitating a number of Proms from this season already taken live, very likely already afternoon-repeated, and, anyway, available 24/7 on the BBC iPlayer (Sounds) – as we are remorselessly reminded, Sarah Walker as annoying as any R3 presenter during this Bristol relay – for us to make our own choices at any hour, so to take up real-time broadcasting once again with already-well-aired concerts seems questionable, at the very least.