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PER LA GLORIA DI ADORARVI

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NICOLAI GEDDA, PIERALBA SOROGA

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LA VIOLETTE

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NICOLAI GEDDA, PIERALBA SOROGA

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AMARILLI

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NICOLAI GEDDA, PIERALBA SOROGA

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AU ROSSIGNOL

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ENVOI DE FLEUR

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OU VOULEZ-VOUS ALLER?

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QUAN'E' BELLA, QUANTO E CARA!

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CHANSON DU FOU

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OUVRE TON COEUR

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JE CROIS ENTENDRE ENCORE

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LA FLEUR

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ARIA DI LENSKY

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POURQUOI ME REVEILLER, O SOUFFLE DU PRINTEMPS?

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AMOR TI VIETA DI NON AMAR

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                 NICOLAI GEDDA, PIERALBA SOROGA

                 Recorded and produced by Giulio Cesare Ricci

                 Recorded in Teatro Goldoni, Livorno

                 Recording date April 10, 1984

                 Instrument Grand Steinway piano

                 Equipment

                 valves microphones: Neumann U 47

                 advanced mike pre-amplifier: Nagra 

                 analog tape recorder: Nagra

Nicolai Gedda (his stage name) was born Ustinov in Stockholm but is of Russian origin. When he was still a child he was sent to singing lessons by his father, a chorister in Kiev. Afterwards he entered the Conservatory obtaining several diplomas, including piano. He completed his singing studies under the guidance of Carl Martin Oehmann, the old Swedish tenor. In 1952, still very young, he enjoyed the privilege of making his debut at the Stockholm Royal Theatre of Opera in Adolphe Adam's very shrewd Postillon de Lon Jumeau. Thus started the complex and exciting career of Nicolai Gedda.

The following year he was already at "La Scala", singing in Carl Orff's Triumph of Aphrodite on its international first night. In the same famous Milan Theatre, he played Tamino in Mozart's The Magic Flute, a composer he was to l o v e all his life. Then he was at the Paris Operà singing in Oberon and the almost unknown Indes Galantes of Rameau.

In the same year he made his debut at London Covent G a r d e n in Rigoletto and La Traviata. He was invited to Aix-en-Provence Festival to interpret Gounod's Mireille and Entführung aus dem Serrail. In 1958 he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in Faust, and he is still one of them o s t important tenors of that theatre, where he sang almost his whole repertoire. And he was to be, again, the first performer of a new Opera by Barber, Vanessa.

He made his debut in Salzburg in an international first night performance once more, I n Liebermann' Die Schule der Frauen.

From now onwards, Nicolai Gedda's repertoire was enriched with very important operas: Orfeo, La Sonnambula, I Puritani, Guglielmo Tel, Boris, Werther, Le Prophète, I Troiani, Lucia di Lammermoor, Massenet's Manon etc. By this time the renowned Sweden was one of the most important tenors of our time and all the theatres in the world contented for him. In fact, his repertoire is boundless and extremely versatile, counting a good 150 operas, about forty operettas and over sixty oratorios, cantatas and masses, as well as about one thousand Lieders and arias from every country.

Of course, Nicolai Gedda is much helped by his perfect knowledge of eight languages (Russian Swedish, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew). Besides, he sang with the greatest conductors including Furtwängler, Karajan, Klemperer, Solti, Abbado, Giulini, Muti, Bernstein and others. Nicolai Gedda is one of the greatest cultured tenors as well as the most eclectic singer of the XXth century.

Bruno Spoleti English translation: Franco Giovannone

After the long abstinence imposed by Calas &Co, 1985 is aged year for the revival of the “tenor’s myth". But what has Nicolai Gedda to do with it? Goodness! But he is a tenor. O.K., but he is a tenor who has nothing to do with the populistic idea of the myth, the most popular but not the only one: and if he partially shares it, it's only for his country of origin, Sweden, where he is considered, at least on an emotional level, the heir of Jussi Bjoerling.

In short, I maintain, there is myth and myth, and we are not talking about the popular consent with large crowds which fill squares and arenas looking for hedonistic sensations. We refer rather to the conscious applause of the theatre and concert hall audiences, or to those who listen to records in their armchairs. But in the second case we have to spend long hours in the living- room, since in thirty years of recording activity Nicolai Gedda has put together such a large amount of operas, operettas and recitals that we have the embarrassment of choosing among them (it is enough to say that by the end of 1963 he had already recorded ascore of operas and three recitals, and even a couple of 78 r.p.ms.).

As if dozens of "studio" recordings weren't enough, there are also precious "live" documents, like this record itself: a Viennese edition of The Ugonots, for instance, and an Italian radio recording of Le Prophète, which can be counted among the zeniths of the extreme versatility of the Swedish singer, real Pillars of Hercules for a tenor who made the right start towards a congenial Mozartian dimension, subsequently broadening his horizons in various and often astonishing directions.

Certainly, today it's unusual to find a tenor who, like Gedda, starts from Adam's Postillon, to reach the sixth upper degree peaks of Guglielmo Tell on the one hand dedicating himself to the normal light-operatic repertoire (with an obvious preference for Mozart's characters) and on the other not hesitating to expose his precious uvula to the surprises not always pleasant of contemporary composers such as Orff or Stravinsky. Stravinsky matches perfectly Gedda's sensitivity, Swedish in origin but so Russian on his father's side as to call himself no less than Ustinov (a surname not unknown in the soviet Nomenklatura). But on this direction, one is more likely to meet Tschaikowski than Stravinsky and, more exactly, the Lenski of Eugene Onegin of which Gedda offers a scenically convincing and vocally striking portrait, as this record shows quite clearly. But this record brings out other peculiar features of Gedda's art: his ability to sing in various languages, Italian, French and Russian (besides German, English and, of course, Swedish) and the above said versatility that enables him to pass with ease from the Italian seventeenth and eighteenth century to the Italo-French Romanticism, to the Franco-Russian Naturalism, the minimum trace of that singular stylistic itinerary which has led the Swedish tenor from Rameau to Liebermann, with captivating deviations along the dead-end track (a very living one, as a matter of fact) that links Johann Strauss to Franz Léhar Within an extremely careful line of singing rise over other features Nicolai Gedda's refinement and good taste. Do these help to build up the "myth of the tenor" too? Frankly, I think they do.

Giorgio Gualerzi English Translation: Franco Giovannone