When you call your CD Golden Age, you’re just inviting attack from the opera crazies (the sort of people who are always banging on about how “nobody can sing Simon Boccanegra better than Lawrence Tibbett did in 1939” and then get into huge flame wars when someone else says that the 1935 version is better!). How can two young singers hope to make a place for themselves in comparison with the greats of the past? In their new CD, Lawrence Brownlee and Eastman graduate Erin Morley respond with an in-your-face title – they’re not afraid of matching up against anyone from the Golden Age of singing.
For them, the Golden Age of the title means chiefly the bel canto and lyric works of the nineteenth century – operas in which the voice is spotlit musically, with long melodies, elaborate ornamentation (coloratura), and high notes galore. On top of all of the fiendish difficulties the singer faces there is an additional challenge – to make it seem effortless, as natural as a birdsong overheard in the woods. Here is where these two excel. In individual arias and in duets, they let the music soar. In the two Donizetti duets that bookend the recital (from La fille du régiment and Don Pasquale), their voices intertwine in a musical back and forth that captures the rapture of newfound love, matching each other note for note and phrase for phrase.
Brownlee’s bright voice and pinging high notes make his performance of a relatively unknown aria from Donizetti’s Marino Faliero such an exciting experience that I’ve had it on “repeat” almost constantly over the past week. Not to be outdone, Morley gives a stunning performance of the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé that is jaw-droppingly accurate in all the vocal leaps that make it such a treacherous sing. It is lovely, too, to hear them together in Lakmé’s much less famous duet “D’où viens-tu?...C’est le Dieu de la jeunesse,” which recalls Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann in its unforced melody and passionate singing. Perhaps Hoffmann might be in the future for both of these singers?
There are similar vocal delights on every track of this disc, and the singers are matched in their musicality and sensitivity by the Munich Radio Orchestra, conducted by Ivan Repušić. At a performance I once attended, a superb performance of an aria caused an audience member to shout, “È come si canta” (“That’s how to sing!”). You might well have the same reaction as you listen to Brownlee and Morley – Golden Age singing of Golden Age music, indeed!
