Barber: Vanessa.(Sound Recording Review)

[] Chickering, Matthews, Dry; Bauwens, Conrad; National Symphony Orchestra and Chorus of Ukraine, Rose. Naxos 8.669140-41 (2)

As part of its admirable, ongoing American Opera Classics series, Naxos offers the second studio recording of Samuel Barber's first commission for the Met, Vanessa. It notably provides a revised text, with the over-florid "Skating Aria" cut, as per the composer's second thoughts, and finds several lines (such as "He does not know what love is") altered or omitted from Gian Carlo Menotti's 1958 text. Naxos's singers and conductor, veterans of an acclaimed Vanessa production at Boston Academy of Music in 2000, recorded the opera in Kiev in 2002. Actually, except for some brass smudges in the Act III prelude that should have been redone, the fine orchestra under Gil Rose's incisive baton provides the chief pleasures of the set. Barber's score, too swiftly dismissed as derivative, boasts many glories of orchestration and ensemble writing; it's something like a masterpiece.

Gifted soprano Ellen Chickering, the Vanessa here, has had a curiously circumscribed career. She is almost purely a local Boston phenomenon, somewhat comparable to Helen Traubel in her pre-Met St. Louis days. Chickering begins in rather blowsy form but soon musters considerable evidence of a major voice, with dramatic-soprano power and a nice sheen in several floated passages. Much of the text is strongly delivered, but as with her singing, a curiously uneven impression remains. Andrea Matthews gives a sympathetic performance as Erika--has anyone ever failed in this marvelously drawn ...