This is announced as the first volume in a new series of discs devoted to Italian song, and there could hardly have been a better introduction than Dennis O’Neill provides with his singing of La ricordanza on the very first track of all. The melody is that of Elvira’s aria “Qui la voce” in I puritani, developed and set to different words in a way which leads Julian Budden, who writes the booklet-notes, to place the song as a reworking rather than a preliminary sketch. Certainly when performed as sensitively as this, it stands on its own as a lovely example of the gift which is special to Bellini in particular and Italian song in general. Ingrid Surgenor also deserves her share of the credit, for the piano part here and elsewhere in this programme looks banal on paper and requires an unusually sympathetic touch if it is not to sound so in performance. The secret lies in a singing right hand and a listening left: Surgenor clearly knows that much and a good deal more. As for the singer, he does all things well. The key is raised from the opera’s E flat to F, and a tenor needs real mastery of his voice to sing softly, gracefully and without resorting to a too-separate head-voice in the phrases assigned to him around the upper key-note. O’Neill manages admirably, both in this respect and in meeting the challenge to preserve a pure legato while singing expressively and making something of the words.
Not everything is quite so satisfying. In two of the best-known songs, “Vanne, o rosa” and “Bella Nice”, both from the Sei ariette, we are reminded that this is not a singer in his first youth. In others, we listen, vaguely aware of something that is missing, and conclude that maybe it is the quality we vaguely define as charm. Yet there is authority, a command of language, tone and idiom, that very rarely brings us up short with the recollection that this is a British singer and not an Italian. Sometimes he shows an individuality of approach, as in the first of the Ariette, “Malincunia”, sung with passion and at a quicker tempo than usual; and, while it is good to feel that a sizeable operatic voice is there in reserve, it is better still to find that ‘reserve’ is indeed the word and that the ample resources are drawn upon with so much restraint.
Voice and piano are well recorded, and the programme sustains interest more readily (I have to confess) than expected – though why, I wonder, was L’abbandono interpolated, breaking the major/minor sequence of the Sei ariette as originally published?'