ROYAL OPERA HOUSE HERITAGE SERIES

 

PUCCINI

 

Madama Butterfly

 

Madama Butterfly           Victoria de los Angeles

Pinkerton                       John Lanigan

Suzuki                           Barbara Howitt

Sharpless                      Geraint Evans

Goro                             David Tree

Il bonzo                         Michael Langdon

Kate Pinkerton               Joyce Livingstone

Il principe Yamadori       David Allen

Il commissario imperiale Ronald Firmager

L’ufficiale del registro      Harry Gawler

 

The Covent Garden Opera Chorus

The Covent Garden Orchestra / Rudolf Kempe

 

Recorded on 2 May 1957 (mono)

 

Rudolf Kempe’s conducting on this set reveals his remarkable control of the Italianate style.  He had conducted Madama Butterfly in 1955 at Covent Garden (with Amy Shuard as Cio-cio-san) and received rapturous reviews from The Times who said “He treated the score as an operatic masterpiece, and since the orchestra responded to him as to a master, the results were intensely thrilling.”

 

Victoria de los Angeles first sang Cio-cio-san at Covent Garden in 1951 under Warwick Braithwaite. The Times review said, "Her voice has a luscious bloom to it, inherently ideal for the music in which Puccini clothes his gentle heroines.” As a reviewer for Opera wrote in June 1957, “the promise of a Madama Butterfly with Victoria de los Angeles had whetted everyone’s expectations, and the event fulfilled them.” He continued “Her typically “instrumental” purity of timbre, so surely controlled, implied the right virginal simplicity, and the radiant confidence of “Un bel dì” very properly won an ovation. Her tone clove the orchestra at its loudest without apparent effort, never straining, always rich and cherished.”

 

With regard to the other members of the cast, The Times wrote that John Lanigan sang “warmly in Italian and makes a character of the feckless Pinkerton” while Dyneley Hussey wrote in The Listener that Lanigan “proved that he can produce true lyrical phrasing and pure tenor tone as good as any but the rarest birds of the south, and with a good deal more real artistry than most.” The Times wrote that Geraint Evans “was perfectly disguised as the Prime Minister” and Barbara Howitt was “rapidly becoming a most accomplished artist.”

  

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