"ENZO DE MURO LOMANTO AND HIS WIFE TOTI DAL MONTE".(Review)

Enzo de Muro Lomanto and Toti Dal Monte

[] "ENZO DE MURO LOMANTO AND HIS WIFE TOTI DAL MONTE" Arias and songs by Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Gounod, Thomas, Bizet, Massenet, Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo and others. No texts or translation. Kicco Classic KC064.2 (Qualiton, dist.)

In August 1928, Toti Dal Monte, the celebrated Italian coloratura soprano, married the tenor Enzo de Muro Lomanto, some nine years her junior, while both singers were on an Australian tour, arranged by the great Nellie Melba. The two had met the previous year, when Dal Monte was singing Maria in Donizetti's La Figlia del Reggimento at La Scala, and the then-unknown tenor was cast as her Tonio by Arturo Toscanini. (Talk about fairy-tale romances!) Unfortunately, the marriage lasted only four years, and on the evidence of this collection, produced not a single duet recording. But it did produce a daughter, Marina, and the couple remained close until de Muro Lomanto, who suffered from asthma, succumbed to emphysema at age fifty in 1952. La Toti, as she was called, lived to the ripe old age of eighty-two, passing away in 1975. Although Dal Monte is the better-known singer, the lion's share of this set is devoted to her husband, a spectacularly gifted artist. De Muro Lomanto had the best qualities of his generation, as well as some residual style from studies with the elegant Fernando de Lucia, which informed his work with a more old-school approach. Dal Monte's instrumental approach to bel canto makes her almost unrecognizable from the emotional powerhouse she is in verismo (as in the 1939 Madama Butterfly recording with Beniamino Gigli). Her husband, on the other hand, adjusts vocal styles from Rossini to Mascagni, but like his great predecessor de Lucia, he brings elements of the old style into play, with vivid effect, in the newer music. Both singers bring the bel canto to verismo, and, aside from some excessive weeping on the part of Dal Monte (which does not mar the vocal line), they express through the use of legato, not around it or instead of it, as was sometimes the case with more "modern" singers of the era.

Most of the Dal Monte recordings encountered here will be familiar to fans of the soprano, save perhaps for two acoustics from 1924 (there is no information about the discs, except for the year of recording). The first, a "Deh! vieni, non tardar" from Le Nozze di Figaro, is delivered in a manner that would make present-day Mozartians run screaming in horror. It is sung more licentiously than freely, with a prolonged F at one point that should be brought to the attention of the Guinness Book of World Records. Despite (or perhaps because of) all this, and a low phrase transposed up an octave, it is quite charming, and the line is ravishing. "Una voce poco fa" from the same year is typical of the other florid pieces on the set; the voice is very forward, the pinpoint staccatos are dead accurate, sustained high notes sometimes of the paint-peeling variety. Chest voice, skirted in the Mozart, is on display everywhere else, but always beautifully blended, and scale passages are uniformly stunning, although not often so expressive as asserted by those who heard her in the theater. Trills were not among Dal Monte's assets; in "Caro Nome" they are all but omitted, and elsewhere they are mostly fudged with a glorified ...