RECORDINGS IN REVIEW

1 8 3 R R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W M A T T H E W A U C O I N The English composer Thomas Adès, in his book Full of Noises, confesses – after incisive appraisals of composers ranging from Mahler to Janáček to Britten – that Verdi ‘‘is very di≈cult for me.’’ At first, he seems merely dismissive: he mentions Verdi while discussing composers whose music just doesn’t work 99 percent of the time. But the 1 percent of Verdi’s music that does work evidently bothers him: For some reason this music [in this case Simon Boccanegra] won’t lie down and die . . . it still somehow has a kind of wriggling existence. . . . Everything about it is wrong. It could hardly be worse. Yet it has this strangely powerful e√ect if it’s done well. . . . I look at it in fascination, and I think: why is it that, despite everything, [Verdi] can make a single moment that is so incredibly strong? Because those moments are stronger than they would be if someone had planned it properly . These things suddenly leap out, like a knife out of the canvas. The penultimate sentence is the crucial one. Great moments in Verdi emerge not in spite but because of the absence of a structural 1 8 4 A U C O I N Y agenda other than maximum moment-by-moment expression and communication. Unlike any other composer of his eminence (and there aren’t many), Verdi looks like a genius only from the one perspective that matters – the middle distance, the human scale, the scale of the theater. Put him under the microscope, and you probably won’t find any astounding hidden patterns. Zoom way out, and you don’t see a meticulously crafted total architecture. But stand on his level, meet him eye to eye, listen moment by moment, and you will practically never hear a misstep in dramatic expression. In art as in science, that middle level – neither micro nor macro, the realm of the visible world and its familiar objects – remains the most unpredictable and unknowable to us. To quote Tom Stoppard ’s Arcadia, the past century’s advancements in science ‘‘only explained the very big and the very small. . . . The ordinary-sized stu√ which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – da√odils – waterfalls – what happens in a cup of co√ee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.’’ We don’t quite know the equations that make those things live – and it is at that mysterious, visible human level that Verdi operates with total confidence. His works are not huge genetically engineered supercreatures , as Wagner’s operas are, nor are they snowflake-rich miniatures like Schubert’s songs. Verdi’s music has the openness and gestural weight of a handshake or a slap in the face. (By contrast, Adès is a kind of atomic scientist capable of forging cosmic structures from microscopic musical molecules; it’s obvious he has little in common with Verdi’s sensibility, but it is nonetheless revealing that a musical thinker of Adès’s brilliance has trouble getting an aerial perspective on what Verdi is up to.) Verdi’s music – again, not in spite of but because of its simplicity – is harder to sing than it sounds. American conservatories try to prepare singers for everything: diction classes in Italian, French, German, (British) English, Czech, and Russian! Alexander technique ! stage-combat training! But breadth of study does not inculcate the naked, honest simplicity Verdi’s music demands. If you didn’t grow up steeped in Verdi’s music and the music of his bel canto predecessors, taking a graduate seminar on the Verdi style is unlikely to help you: Verdi’s music doesn’t work if it sounds stud- R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W 1 8 5 R ied or cautious – or e√ortful, even though it demands a...