CCSO Passport SIG FNL

Classics Series
Italy’s music is as flavorful as its food,
and we’re in the mood to sample it all:
ageless arias, Neopolitan folk songs,
haunting film scores, modern-day love
songs. Two outstanding vocalists join us.
An orchestral showpiece brings us home.
No matter your heritage. You will love
being Italian today.
24 |
Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra
Live it Up! 2012|13
| 25
Center Stage
The Music
Passport to
Italy
November 3 & 4, 2012
Jung-Ho Pak, Conductor
Maria Ferrante, Soprano
Matthew DiBattista, Tenor
Gioachino Rossini
Barber of Seville Overture
Ennio Morricone
Gabriel’s Oboe and Cinema Paradiso
Francesco Sartori
Con te Partiro
Giacomo Puccini
O Suave Fanciulla from La Boheme
O Mio Babbino Caro
from Gianni Schicchi
Giuseppe Verdi
Triumphal March from Aida
Ruggiero Leoncavallo
Matinnata
Eduardo Di Capua
O Sole Mio in A-Flat
INTERMISSION
Ottorino Respighi
Pines of Rome
26 |
W
hether you are a seasoned globetrotter or a confirmed armchair
traveller, you must have felt the lure
of Italy. The food, the wine, the beaches, Roman ruins,
medieval churches and Renaissance palazzi – the bootshaped peninsula has something for everyone.
But no matter how you slice it, it’s impossible to think
of Italy without thinking of Italian music. After all, this is the
country where opera singers are as popular as star athletes
and everyone from cab drivers to bartenders has a strong
opinion about the latest production of La Bohème or Aida.
Therefore, if you can’t make it to Rome, Florence or Venice
this year, the next best thing you can do is to take in the
essence of this sun-drenched country – on the wings of
song.
Opera – the artform that unites music, drama, poetry
and the visual arts – was born here some 400 years ago
Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra
and continues to reign supreme even today.
When people hear the first downbeat of the
overture to The Barber of Seville (1816),
they immediately think of the hours of fun
that lie ahead watching a handsome young
aristocrat gets the girl of his dreams by defeating
a ridiculous adversary with the help of an
ingenious barber. True, Gioachino Rossini (17921868) used this same overture in two other
operas before The Barber. Yet the irresistible
melodies and the sparkling wit of the music
now seem inseparable from this, one of the
most celebrated comic operas ever written.
Composers of more popular genres have
learned a great deal from the abundant
melodic invention of the operatic
masters. Ennio Morricone (b. 1928),
Live it Up! 2012|13
to whom we owe some of the best Italian movie
soundtracks, has certainly inherited the great
tradition. His tunes hold their own even without
the movies for which they were written. The
excerpt from The Mission (Roland Joffé, 1986)
is a case in point: we can enjoy it even if we
don’t know that, in the movie,
Continued next page >
| 27
The Music
army, returns from a victorious battle against the
Ethiopians and is greeted by the King, the High
Priest and an enthusiastic crowd.
Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1858-1919) was
Puccini’s contemporary and rival. He composed
his own version of La Bohème in 1897; his
greatest success was I Pagliacci (roughly, “The
Clowns”). His self-standing song Mattinata
(Morning) was written for the legendary tenor
Enrico Caruso in 1904; it was one of the first
pieces composed
to be recorded.
Caruso’s early
version was
followed by
innumerable
later renderings;
in 108 years,
a Spanish Jesuit priest named Gabriel (Jeremy
Irons) wins over a community of natives in the
Amazonian rain forest by playing this melody.
Gabriel’s Oboe goes very well with another
great Morricone hit, the theme from Cinema
Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), in which
a famous director remembers how he first came
to love the movies in the small Sicilian village
where he was born.
The passion and vocal brilliance of opera
also animates the ever-popular Con te partirò
(literally “with you I will leave,” but known in
English as Time to Say Goodbye). Francesco
Sartori (b. 1957) composed the signature song
of Andrea Bocelli; Lucio Quarantotto wrote the
lyrics.
Back to the classics, we’ll hear two beloved
excerpts from the operas of Giacomo Puccini
(1858-1924). In O soave fanciulla from La
Bohème (1896), we see the young poet Rodolfo
28 |
and
the poor seamstress
Mimi fall in love at first sight; in O mio babbino
caro, from Gianni Schicchi (1918), a girl named
Lauretta is pleading with her father to let her buy
a wedding ring. Puccini projects his characters’
feelings in such a timeless manner that we may
all recognize ourselves in the music.
Opera can represent not only the private
sphere but the public, and even the political, as
well. Aida (1870) by Giuseppe Verdi (18131901), a classic falling-in-love-with-the-enemy
story, is all about the clash between personal
lives and official worlds. Set in ancient Egypt,
Aida contains the famous Triumphal March
in which Radames, the leader of the Egyptian
Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra
the song has lost none of its appeal and its
popularity.
While Verdi, Puccini, Leoncavallo and others
were writing their operas for the great theaters
of Milan, Venice, Rome and Naples, a different
kind of tradition was also flourishing at an
annual festival in the Piedigrotta neighborhood
of Naples. Once a local specialty, the canzone
neapolitana (popular song written in the
Neapolitan dialect) has conquered the entire
world, thanks to a long line of singers beginning
with Caruso, a native of Naples who had started
his career in the cafés of his hometown. He
introduced O sole mio to New York as early
as 1904. Written in 1898 by Eduardo di Capua
(1865-1917) to lyrics by Giovanni Capurro, this
lyrical gem became one of the most famous of
all Neapolitan canzoni.
Italy’s Signature Song
As the golden olive oil heats in a heavy
saucepan, an old woman deftly crushes basil
and garlic with a practiced press of her knife. The
alluring aroma of the sauce drifts through the small
house like a familiar piece of music.
The beloved Neapolitan love song O Sole Mio might be the soundtrack
to such a scene. Ever- affiliated with the great city of Naples, the song is
so quintessentially Italian that it was once played on the Olympic podium
when the recording of the country’s national anthem was lost. Now
known the world over, O Sole Mio has transcended its humble origins:
Luciano Pavarotti, Mario Lanza and Elvis Presley [It’s Now or Never] have all
performed it. Younger generations may have heard the version by Il Volo,
a trio of Italian operatic pop teenage singers. Even younger listeners may
recognize it from a Spongebob Squarepants episode.
Live it Up! 2012|13
| 29
The Music
Ottorino Respighi
Pines of Rome
The Movie That
Inspired the Music
I
f it is at all possible to set a
whole city to music, Ottorino
Respighi (1879-1936) did it
in his magnificent orchestral trilogy
The Fountains of Rome (1916), The Pines of Rome
(1923-24) and Roman Festivals (1928). In his
colorful and virtuosic orchestral language, Respighi
conjured up vivid impressions of memorable places
and moments in his favorite city.
The four sections of the Pines of Rome are
played without pause. Each of the sections depicts
pine trees in different parts of the city – or rather,
various activities going on around those trees. As
the composer noted: “The century-old trees which
dominate so characteristically the Roman landscape
become testimony for the principal events in
Roman life.”
Respighi further explained the individual
movements of his piece in a note included in the
printed score:
The Pine Trees of the Villa Borghese. Children
are at play in the pine groves of the Villa Borghese;
they dance around in circles, they play at soldiers,
marching and fighting, they are wrought up by
their own cries like swallows at evening, they come
30 |
and go in swarms.
Suddenly the scene
changes and…
Pine Trees near a Catacomb.
We see the shades of the pine trees fringing the
entrance to a catacomb. From the depths rises the
sound of mournful psalm-singing, floating through
the air like a solemn hymn, and gradually and
mysteriously dispersing.
The Pine Trees of the Janiculum [one of the seven
hills on which Rome was built]. A quiver runs
through the air: the pine trees of the Janiculum
stand distinctly outlined in the clear light of a full
moon. A nightingale is singing. [Respighi startled
quite a few of his contemporaries by calling for a
gramophone recording of a nightingale’s song.]
The Pine Trees of the Appian Way. Misty dawn
on the Appian Way: solitary pine trees guarding the
magic landscape; the muffled, ceaseless rhythm of
unending footsteps. The poet has a fantastic vision
of bygone glories: trumpets sound and, in the
brilliance of the newly-risen sun, a consular army
bursts forth towards the Sacred Way, mounting in
triumph to the Capitol.
Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra
Toto, a precocious orphan boy,
befriends Alfredo, the projectionist at
the local cinema. The boy discovers that the
frequent booing he hears in the audience is the
result of cuts in the film where romance has been
censored by the town’s priest. Alfredo is blinded
when an explosion destroys the cinema; Toto is the
only person who can operate the projector when the
cinema is rebuilt. As the boy’s film career begins to
flourish, his blind friend increasingly drives him away
from home to pursue his dreams. Many years later,
Toto – now a world-famous director – learns that his
mentor has died, leaving behind only a single reel of film: a
montage of all the kisses he had once cut from the movies.
This is Cinema Paradiso, winner of the Grand Prix du Jury at
Cannes in 1989. Today, you will hear its beautiful theme, written
by the terrific cinema composer Ennio Morricone, who has scored
over five hundred motion pictures. Morricone is a two-time winner
of both Grammy and Golden Globe awards. He has won European
honors too numerous to list. This five-time Oscar nominee was
awarded the Academy’s Honorary Award in 2007 for “his magnificent
and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.”
The Song that Helped Launch a Career
A strikingly handsome man takes the stage in the
winter of 1995 to sing a new song by the songwriting
duo of Francesco Sartori and Lucio Quarantotto.
Though tall and powerfully built, the singer must
be guided to the microphone. He cannot see. He is
Andrea Bocelli. The song he debuts that day, Con
te partiro, will win no awards at the festival and the
studio version on his self-titled album, Bocelli, will
receive little airplay in Italy. But in France, Belgium
and Germany the song quickly becomes yet another
well-loved Italian export and the biggest selling single of all-time.
Translated into English as a duet with famed soprano Sarah Brightman, the song
becomes a world-wide sensation and instantly recognizable from television,
radio and cinema.
Live it Up! 2012|13
| 31
The Artists
Guest Artist Sponsor
Maria Ferrante
Soprano
“Maria Ferrante broke my heart Sunday night,” wrote Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe. “Or,
through her, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly did… The combination of delicacy and intensity she
brought to many phrases brought tears to my eyes.” This vocal powerhouse experienced success
early on, winning the Mario Lanza Vocal Competition, among others. She’s performed more than
20 operatic roles [Mimi and Musette in La Boheme, Rosalind in Die Fledermaus, and Pamina in
The Magic Flute], toured internationally singing works by Brahms, Beethoven, Haydn and Verdi
and created new roles, such as Ophelia in They Bore Him Barefaced. She’s also put in studiotime recording Best Kept Secrets, A Treasury of Passionate American Songs and Christmas in
Worcester. Speaking of Worcester. GoLocalWorcester.com just named her one of “The 10 Coolest
People” in her hometown and gave her a standing ovation for founding vocal programs at local
universities. About 180,000 other residents were in the running. We can’t wait for you to hear why
she stands out from the crowd.
dining guide
Matthew DiBattista
Tenor
Opera News described him as “mega-talented.” The word “brilliant” also came up. While great
reviews certainly get your attention, only great performances keep it. And that’s what you’re in for
today. This super-versatile tenor has played the villain, the love interest and the comic relief in all the
operas you know and love – superbly. Last season, he joined the roster of the Metropolitan Opera’s
production of Romeo et Juliette, sang the Valet Tenors in Les Contes d’Hoffman with Florida
Grand Opera and played Flute in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Boston Lyric Opera. He’s
appeared as a soloist in Messiah with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, Concord Symphony
Orchestra and Boston’s Masterwork’s Chorale and peformed Mozart’s Requiem, Rachmaninoff’s
Vespers, Schumann’s Mass and Requiem and Haydn’s Mass
In Time of War. When not performing, he’s teaching. Not
surprisingly, he’s had a bit of success with that, too. Tenor Joseph
Kaiser of The Metropolitan Opera says, “I owe a great deal of my
success to Matthew DiBattista.”
32 |
Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra
Live it Up! 2012|13
| 33