Concert
Brian Cefai, tenor; Ivan Vella, baritone; Ramona Galea, soprano; Francesca Bartolo, mezzo-soprano; Elaine Mercieca, pianist
Casino Maltese
Music Maestro Productions last Saturday presented a lyrical concert in aid of the Malta Community Chest Fund, featuring veteran tenor Brian Cefai and a number of young singers. I had possibly heard baritone Ivan Vella before, but Ramona Galea’s and Francesca Bartolo’s voices were utterly new to me.
Elaine Mercieca accompanied at the piano in a continuous programme. She provided a solo interlude by playing Rachmaninov’s very Romantic Prelude in D Major, Op. 23, No. 4. Her steady support at the piano proved a valuable asset to the singers except for two or three hiccups.
The evening started off with Vella singing Udite o rustici from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. The baritone has an outgoing and engaging personality and sings with expression. His timbre is rather smoky but that is no problem. It is his intonation which he sometimes needs to concentrate upon and to pay attention to the proper sustaining of notes.
The Donizetti piece had quite a lot of verve and cheek while Tosti’s completely different Ideale sounded much better. Vella was very good in the duet Là ci darem la mano from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, but needed better phrasing in Deh vieni non tardar from the same opera. My only gripe with him in the famous duet from Les pêcheurs de perles was that he shouted rather than sang the final high notes.
When it comes to soprano Galea, hers is a fresh new voice and a considerably talented one. When singing solo she tends to move her arms too much, which one finds quite distracting. She seems to maintain more physical stability when singing in duo or ensemble. When it comes to her singing, she delivers to the full: she sings with an easy and smooth flexibility. This was clearly demonstrated in Caccini’s famous Ave Maria, in Morricone’s Nella Fantasia, in the duet Magnificat by Frisina and in Offenbach’s Barcarolle. She held her own in a duet version of Non ti scordar di me (the original De Curtis classic not Giusy Ferreri’s completely unrelated pop song) with Cefai.
Cefai proved that his voice is still beautiful and has weathered the years well
Bartolo’s voice is a kind of enigma to me and hard to classify. It is wide-ranging and all in all she definitely sings much better, and with little effort, in the higher reaches. In the Frisina Magnificat duet she just could not pitch and project her voice properly and her Voi che sapete from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro was far from polished; yet, in Là ci darem la manoshe, she sounded as if she were completely different and a pretty good singer.
Handel’s Rejoice greatly O daughter of Zion from Messiah in its A-B-A form provided some surprises. Bartolo was very good and complete with smooth runs in the outer sections but with less happy results in the central part. In the duet Tace il labbro, from Léhar’s The Merry Widow, she was well-matched with Cefai but I found her part in Offenbach’s Barcarolle a bit dull. I suppose this young lady will have to decide what to sing unless she radically tackles her lower register.
In this concert Cefai proved that his voice is still beautiful and has weathered the years well. He started with a charming baroque number, Alessandro Scarlatti’s Già il sole dal Gange, and smoothly switched to purely deliver bel canto in Donizetti’s Una furtiva lagrima from L’elisir d’amore. He did not disappoint at all with his contribution to the Bizet duet mentioned above, listed as Au fond du temple saint in the programme but puzzlingly sung in Italian.
He did equally well in the other duets with soprano and mezzo-soprano and gave a magnificent rendering of Bizet’s Agnus Dei, a performance matched by that of De Capua’s O sole mio.
The programme ended with a lovely arrangement for vocal quartet of Cottra’s very popular Santa Lucia.