Vos critiques
8Triunfo de Belen Elvira junto a Placido Domingo
…For the second half, Jorge de Leon was joined by the mezzo-soprano Belén Elvira. They opened with scenes five and seven from act one of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. Elvira proved to have a rich, deep and vibrant mezzo-soprano voice, though occasionally it seemed a to lose focus and be too vibrato laden, but the results were highly impressive. She and Leon made a very dramatic and thrilling duo in this torrid scene between Santuzza and Turiddu. In many ways, this was not an obvious excerpt to take from the opera and rather more akin to a bleeding chunk. This was emphasised by the slightly schematic dramatics used by the singers, which gave the performance a rather oldfashioned air. But there were old fashioned virtues too, particularly in Leon's flexible but thrilling spinto tones, wonderfully even over the whole range and the vibrancy of Elvira's performance. Leon followed this E lucevan le stelle from Puccini's Tosca which he sang with impassioned, Italianate open spinto tone and a nice flexible sense of line. Elvira returned to join Leon for a duet from Luisa Fernanda, a zarzuela by Federico Moreno Torroba (1891 - 1982). It was far less popular in style than I naively expected from a zarzuela, which is a form rather more complex than we often give it credit for. Torroba had written a fascinatingly flexible and rather melancholy duet which followed the shape of the text. Here it was finely sung by Leon and Elvira, with a moving conclusion. Elvira then sang the Princesse de Boullion's act two solo from Adriana Lecouvreur by Francesco Cilea (1866 - 1950). Acerba volutta seemed ideally suited to the old-fashioned drama of Elvira's singing and it was clear that she would make a powerful, thrilling and dramatic Princesse de Bouillon. The evening concluded with another duo, this time the closing scene from Bizet's Carmen. Again Leon and Elvira had chosen to give us a highly dramatic scene rather than a more conventional operatic excerpt such as the Flower Song (though I would very much love to hear Leon performing this). Elvira's Carmen was perhaps a bit stately and a bit grand, but then Leon's Don Jose was a little stiff and both would have benefited from work with a good director. But musically this was superb stuff, again I come back to rather old-fashioned virtues. Doing the final scene from Carmen was in many ways a daring choice, but the performers brought it off thanks to their fine singing. Here we had thrilling voices used intelligently with some musical and dramatic singing.
