Welsh National Opera Orchestra/Carlo Rizzi
Signum Classics SIGCD778 70:15 mins
Conductor Carlo Rizzi insists that his symphonic suites from two of the composer’s most popular operas – Tosca and Madam Butterfly – are not arrangements, but rather ‘the music of Puccini’. Purely instrumental versions of operatic music, of course, are nothing new.
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As one of today’s leading Puccini interpreters, Rizzi is well qualified to create new pieces of this type, which are in effect opera without voices. This is possible because (as Puccini expert Roger Parker comments in his liner notes) the composer’s frequently self-sufficient orchestral underpinning means that the ‘musical substance of entire arias can be delivered without the voice being present’.
Though not in dramatic order, the technically impeccable result has been ingeniously assembled and is finely performed by the Welsh National Opera Orchestra, which naturally knows the original scores well. To these Rizzi adds two early orchestral works, the Preludio sinfonico first performed at a student concert at the Milan Conservatory in July 1882, and the Capriccio sinfonico, Puccini’s graduation piece from the Conservatory, premiered exactly a year later.
In fact, we hear the Preludio twice, both in its original form (restored here by Rizzi) and in a later version that cuts some 90 seconds off the piece. Neither is a distinguished example of Puccini’s art, though already his flair for orchestral writing is readily apparent.
Points of interest include the distinctly Wagnerian opening of the Preludio, with its obvious reminiscence of the Lohengrin prelude, and a chunk of the Capriccio which 13 years later Puccini recycled as the opening musical gesture of La bohème, where he recalls, perhaps, his own student life in Milan as he describes that of his four Bohemians in their Parisian attic.