CAST OF CHARACTERS

PROLOGUE
SIMON BOCCANEGRA (Baritone) Gordon Hawkins
A corsair in the service of the Genoese republic
JACOPO FIESCO (Bass) Vladimir Vaneev
A Genoese noble
PAOLO ALBIANI (Bass) Yaron Windmüller
A gold-spinner of Genoa
PIETRO (Baritone) Martin Snell
A commoner of Genoa

THE DRAMA
SIMON BOCCANEGRA (Baritone) Gordon Hawkins
First Doge of Genoa
AMELIA GRIMALDI (Soprano) Nuccia Focile
Actually Maria Boccanegra, daughter of Simon
JACOPO FIESCO (Bass) Vladimir Vaneev
Known as Andrea
GABRIELE ADORNO (Tenor) Paul Charles Clarke
A Genoese gentleman
PAOLO ALBIANI (Bass) Yaron Windmüller
Favourite courtier of the Doge
PIETRO (Baritone) Martin Snell
Another courtier
A CAPTAIN OF ARCHERS (Tenor) James Meng
AMELIA’S MAID (Mezzo-Soprano) Wendy Dawn Thompson

The action takes place in and near Genoa in the middle of the 14th Century. Twenty-five years pass between the prologue and the drama.

MMT2045-46
Live Digital Stereo Recording

© 2002 HRL Morrison Music Trust
P 2002 HRL Morrison Music Trust

The Morrison Music Trust is pleased to present the first in a projected series of co-operative recording projects with the New Zealand Festival. The centrepiece of every Festival is always the production of an opera, and I believe that these have been able to stand with the very finest anywhere else in the world. It is wholly appropriate that we should commence what promises to be a very exciting relationship with New Zealand’s most prestigious arts event by making available to posterity this wonderful production of Simon Boccanegra. This is a recording which those people lucky enough to have attended the performance will treasure, and we would like to thank everyone who has made its realisation possible.
Lloyd Morrison
Chairman, HRL Morrison Music Trust

The New Zealand Festival is delighted that our fine production of Simon Boccanegra with its stunning cast has been captured on disc. The combination of the excellent voices of a truly stellar international cast with the magnificent New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of rising star Maestro Guidarini, delivered a genuine operatic treat that would have been at home on any international stage. We were enormously proud of the production and are thrilled with this recording, as work of this standard has rarely been heard in New Zealand.
Alex Reedijk
Executive Director, The New Zealand Festival

Recording opera and concerts ‘live’ has many advantages over the usual methods of capturing music to be enjoyed in the home. The atmosphere of a performance is built up over a long span, and when performers know they cannot stop a special, more intense kind of concentration is present which can elevate the music to great heights. Normally an opera is recorded aria by aria and recitative by recitative, but rarely in sequence. It is cheaper to record each character's music all in one go, no matter where it may appear in the opera. In this way everyone’s participation is minimised and costs reduced.
Here we were recording a performance – something far removed from the ‘rehearse-and-record’ method so frequently used with casts who are often complete strangers to each other. Some operas suffer more from this ‘stop-start’ method of working, and none more so than Verdi’s masterpiece Simon Boccanegra. The elements of this opera are fused seamlessly together into an unbroken arch of dark, intense music drama.
To produce this pair of CDs I combined the best elements of two performances, working with sophisticated sound enhancement systems to remove as much of the stage noise as possible. None of this would have been possible without the most sophisticated and complex recording techniques and I must pay the warmest tribute to my colleague Neil Maddever who, under extraordinary difficulties, has produced a very fine recording.
Murray Khouri
Producer

Libretto
Sourced from G.Ricordi & Co edition published 1948.
English Version Mary Ellis Peltz
© 1964 G.Schirmer, Inc.

Thanks to
All the artists and musicians who gave their permission to release this recording.

Roger Wilson
Diana Cable and Alex Reedijk (NZ Festival)
Tana Mitchell (Eyework Design)
Kelly Daykin
Susan Clifford
Roger Flury (National Library of New Zealand)
Opera Australia
Boosey & Hawkes Australia
G.Schirmer, Australia
G. Ricordi, Milan.

‘I had a fiasco in Venice almost as great as that of La Traviata. I thought I’d done something passable but it seems I was mistaken’, wrote Giuseppe Verdi in 1857, after the première of his 21st opera, Simon Boccanegra. He was not mistaken, and he exaggerates the failure of his new opera. But it is true that this first version of Simon Boccanegra was not a success. It won some critical but not popular approval and was quietly forgotten – except by Verdi, who never lost faith in its intrinsic merits. A revised version of the score was performed in Milan 24 years later. Verdi often revised his scores for practical reasons, but not even Don Carlos underwent such radical surgery as Simon Boccanegra. The triumphant success of the revised version is attributable largely to Verdi’s collaboration with a new librettist, the highly literate fellow composer Arrigo Boito, who later cajoled the aged Verdi into creating with him his last two operas, Otello and Falstaff.

Verdi was born in humble circumstances near Busseto in 1813. Rejected by the Conservatory in Milan, he studied there privately before returning to his home town where he married the daughter of his patron. His first opera, Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio, was performed at La Scala in 1839. His next, the comedy Un giorno di regno, was a disaster. However Verdi, whose wife and two small children had recently died, was rescued from defeat and despair by the commission of Nabucco, a triumphant success. Then followed what he called his ‘galley years’ as he laboured to establish and maintain his reputation, churning out 14 operas in nine years. The pace slackened slightly after the ‘big three’, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata. From 1853-1855 he lived in Paris, working on his first French opera, Les vêpres siciliennes. Verdi was now in a financial position to be selective about the work he undertook and he built a fine country house at Sant’Agata near Busseto. He lived there for the rest of his life with his mistress and then second wife, Giuseppina Strepponi. He was only lured out of semi-retirement by lucrative commissions like La forza del destino (St Petersburg, 1862), Don Carlos (Paris, 1867) and Aida (Cairo, 1871). After a long gap Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) were written when he was 73 and 79 respectively. He died in Milan in 1901.

Throughout his career Verdi continued to refine his instrumentation technique and his ideas of musical and dramatic form so that every one of his operas is a transitional work, an advance on the one before. Simon Boccanegra is a particularly important transition however, moving from the ‘personal’ period of operas like Luisa Miller and La Traviata, concerned primarily with the private, intimate relationships between characters, toward a more international phase. Verdi strove to revitalise the Meyerbeerian grand operas popular in Paris with his own Italian-style humanity and dramatic truth. Simon Boccanegra’s cool reception from an audience hoping for another Trovatore was because it seemed a sombre and pessimistic work with few solo star turns except, perhaps, Fiesco’s bass aria “Il lacerato spirito”. The romantic interest is not paramount: more important and interesting is the father-daughter bond between Boccanegra and Amelia/Maria. The main character, the title rôle, has no extended lyrical scena to himself.

But Verdi, as so often, was one step ahead of his audience. Though concerned with box office success, dramatic and psychological truth was what mattered to him. He could write a hit number anyone could whistle, even a deliberately banal one like “La donna è mobile” in Rigoletto, for a dramatic purpose if he so wished. There is no lack of wonderful melody in Simon Boccanegra but it is subtly woven into the score as a whole while the extensive recitative, the first he wrote to a text in prose, heightens and intensifies the dramatic exchanges. Boccanegra, stricken with guilt, attains heroic status by maintaining the nobility and compassion that typified his reign as Doge. Boccanegra needs no showpiece aria to dominate the action.

The revision, a quarter of a century later, came when Verdi had already written Don Carlos, Aida and the Requiem and was being tempted into a collaboration with Boito on Otello. In a sense the revised Boccanegra is a trial run for the partnership, and a triumphant one. The voluminous correspondence between Verdi and Boito is a fascinating saga in its own right: gradually the wary old composer, punctilious as ever about his libretti, comes to trust the much younger Boito’s judgement. The main addition to the revised version is Boito’s splendid council chamber scene to which Verdi responded with music of a grandeur that looks toward Otello. Boccanegra’s great address which ends the act, “Plebe, Patrizzi, Popolo”, is Verdian declamation at its best. And the character of Paolo develops from a conventional villain to something more sinister, a prototype Iago. Verdi’s reworking of the score is extensive. The orchestration was changed, the harmonic structure and vocal lines given new subtlety and flexibility. Simon Boccanegra’s second première was a great success: the Milan audience had also moved on and could appreciate Verdi’s originality. While the opera is not his most frequently performed, its greatness has never been disputed. The plot is involved, but the great situations of love, hate, treachery and reconciliation have their own dramatic truth and clarity. And the music is Verdi at his most magnificent.