Do persevere with this one. It begins (after the sepulchral darkness and beautiful solo string writing of the Prelude) disconcertingly badly: the backwardly-placed chorus in the opening scene (not really a Hymn to the Sun, as it is usually called: the chorus represents the sun, and must therefore be invisible, off-stage) are muffled, the orchestra brightly tinny in anything above forte and when Daniella Dessi is first heard it sounds as though she’s having an off-day, too, her upper notes spreading under pressure. Everything rapidly improves, however. Within ten minutes or so the engineers have sorted out their balance difficulties and Dessi has recovered.
Mascagni’s problem is said to have been that he never quite managed to repeat the success of Cavalleria rusticana. I haven’t heard all his subsequent operas, though I’ve sought out as many of them as I can, and to me they demonstrate that Mascagni for the most part made determined efforts not to repeat Cavalleria. Apart from its expected wealth of melody, Iris might almost be by a different composer. Quite apart from its dramatic ingenuities (an elaborate ‘play within a play’, a duet in which one character speaks while the other sings, the drama’s framing with anti-realistic choruses, the strange scene in which Iris, dying in an open sewer, encounters spectres representing the egotism of those who have destroyed her), it contains musical innovations that one hardly expects either from the composer of Cavalleria or the rather embittered conservative that Mascagni eventually became – almost impressionist harmony, for a start, and a striking and accomplished use of the whole-tone scale. In 1898, and in Italy, that almost puts Mascagni among the avant-garde. Then there is his use of ‘light’ music, often of an oriental cast, for sinister ends. And that strange, almost repulsively gripping monologue that Italians call “La piovra” (“The octopus” – Iris recounts her dream of an octopus engulfing the naked body of a beautiful woman, who smiles as she dies: the octopus is the image of pleasure and of death) – one assumes that Mascagni and his librettist Illica have been overdosing on Freud, but no: Iris appeared two years before The Interpretation of Dreams.
Dessi is very good at “La piovra” – it is wildly and justifiably applauded – and movingly evokes the pathos of Iris’s nostalgia for the little garden she once tended (she has been abducted and forced into a brothel). Indeed, after that opening scene the entire performance matures into just the sort of reading this opera needs. The role of Osaka, the wealthy nobleman at whose behest Iris is kidnapped but who is soon bored by her childish innocence, must be frustrating for an intelligent tenor: it is shortish, with very little room to suggest subtlety of character. Cura responds with warm, robust tone, quite recalling the young Placido Domingo or indeed the young Franco Corelli, but also demonstrating that he has a lovely mezza voce available for any role that might need it rather more than this one does. I don’t much care for talk of the ‘Fourth Tenor’, but this recording convincingly demonstrates that Cura is a singer of exceptional quality and even greater promise.
Servile as the odious procurer is excellent: insinuating to Osaka, bullying to the women of his establishment. Ghiaurov is very reliable as Iris’s old, blind father, and the small but crucial role of the Geisha (crucial because Iris is drawn into a duet with her, and the voices should not be too dissimilar in quality) is well taken by Nakamaru. Gelmetti obviously believes in this score and he handles its delicacies as well as its occasional crudities with great sympathy. The recording, once past its teething troubles, is not at all bad, with a good sense of the stage.
Sony’s ten-year-old recording of Iris is still worth considering, especially for Domingo’s Osaka, but Dessi is more touching than Sony’s slightly tremulous Iris, Ilona Tokody, and in this opera Cura is already close to Domingo’s equal. At least a couple of recordings with the incomparable Magda Olivero in the title-role have been intermittently available, but none of them has a tenor of Cura’s (or Domingo’s) standard.'