Renata Scotto’s La Sonnambula in Philadelphia
1967 was a very good year for Renata Scotto both in the quality of her singing and in her approach to opera as drama. The soprano had three standout performances that year. The May 18th Lucia di Lammermoor in Naples noted on this site. She sang a vocally impressive Gilda in Rigoletto on August 11th in Buenos Aires with Cornell MacNeil and Richard Tucker. But her performance of Amina in V. Bellini’s La Sonnambula will be remembered as one of the best Bel Canto displays in her career.
Again, Max de Schauensee, the Bulletin music critic was there to give his accounting of the soprano’s stellar evening. De Schauensee’s musical observations about the opera are direct and telling.” ‘La Sonnambula,’ unless brilliantly and stylistically sung and staged can be a faded, dated experience…naive in its popularesco (rustic-popular) manner but is saved by his (Bellini) exquisite sense of elegiac melody… in the ravishing solos and mellifluous duets.”
De Schauensee then moves on to Scotto’s performance. “Miss Scotto, a stage personality of great vitality and charm, sings most beautifully despite occasional tonal hardness…She has profound belief in her work and this becomes immediately communicated to the audience. Her singing of the famous last-act aria, “Ah non creda mirarti,” was like the sighing of a zephyr in its floating limpidity, and her voice rose in an extraordinary burst of power and ascending trills in the final joyous,”Ah non ginuge.”
Scotto was joined by French-Canadian tenor Pierre Duval, “who was able to cope with the two or three high Cs and even a D-flat. His best work occurred in the second act.” Ezio Flagello was the Count Rodolphe, “singing with rich tone throughout the evening.” De Shauensee also had kind words for the stage director and the conductor. “Because of Henry Butler’s stage direction which, with Fausto Cleva’s conducting insured us one of the best integrated performances in the history of this company,” (Lyric Opera Company).
De Shauensee closes his review with his typically persuasive summing-up: “What could easily have been a bore, turned out to be an engaging evening. Orchids to Miss Scotto, Mr. Butler and Mr. Cleva.”
Premiere Opera LTD CD 2626-2
