Word: tito
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ethnic, national and religious hatreds that go back for centuries. The country that is now vanishing was an artificial creation of conflicting cultures, patched together in the wake of two world wars. Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Slavs were held in check only by strongman Josip Broz Tito's centralized communist system. By the time of his death in 1980, the country was already unraveling. Political power had decentralized, the relatively prosperous economy was faltering, and old tensions began to rise. The richer republics of the northwest, Slovenia and Croatia, felt their development was hampered by the poorer republics...
...January, Christopher Hogwood offered a concert performance, with the Handel and Haydn Society, of Mozart's second and last effort in the serious vein, La Clemenza di Tito. The renewal of these two pieces, which circumscribe Mozart's years of maturity and his best musical output, has been the major revelation in the months after the festivities anticlimaxed with innumerable performances of the Requiem last November...
...good, and an inspiring counter-example is John Eliot Gardiner's recording of La Clemenza di Tito (to be released April 21 on Deutsche Grammophon Archiv). Here, a truly innovative approach (using period instruments) combines with a genuine reappraisal of the opera as a whole, and the result is nothing less than a revelation. Mozart worked on both Tito and the Magic Flute at the same time during the summer of 1791 and at great speed. Yet, while the music of the Magic Flute has met with universal praise almost since its premiere, that of Tito has been disparaged...
...Tito is Mozart's second and last opera seria, and shows a master grappling with a heavily codified form and using it to his compositional advantage. Although the form had traditionally excluded ensemble singing, Mozart's greatest successes had been with the extensive ensembles in his great comic operas. Accordingly, he came up with a compromise that went beyond even his ensemble writing for these operas: the finale to the first act, which combines an on-stage ensemble and an antiphonal chorus...
...this is brilliantly rendered by Eliot Gardiner and friends. Furthermore, the principals negotiate the passages of secco recitative with a rare sense for the shape that can be given to each phrase. Anthony Rolfe Johnson as Tito does an admirable job with a role that too easily becomes lifeless and statuesque. Anne Sofie von Otter is a brilliant Sesto, while Julia Varady's Vitellia is truly arresting, combining sensuality with vengeful duplicity. The orchestral playing, through the ministrations of the English Baroque Soloists, is tightly controlled and thoughtful, and the obbligato parts are spectacular. This is a truly visionary interpretation...