Nuova Era's 1992 release of music by Menotti features his opera The Telephone, a piano piece, and a song cycle. The Telephone, led here by Paolo Vaglieri, has the advantage of being a new approach to a work whose performances can slip into a groove of easy predictability. Orchestra da Camera di Milano plays like a chamber ensemble; what the sound lacks in the blend expected of a chamber orchestra is compensated for in the clarity of the individual lines that reveal felicities in the orchestration rarely heard so distinctly. ...
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Nuova Era's 1992 release of music by Menotti features his opera The Telephone, a piano piece, and a song cycle. The Telephone, led here by Paolo Vaglieri, has the advantage of being a new approach to a work whose performances can slip into a groove of easy predictability. Orchestra da Camera di Milano plays like a chamber ensemble; what the sound lacks in the blend expected of a chamber orchestra is compensated for in the clarity of the individual lines that reveal felicities in the orchestration rarely heard so distinctly. Vaglieri's tempi, however, are uniformly slow to the point of being sluggish, and he lacks a sense of comic timing; vocal lines that demand the mercurial flexibility of naturalistic dialogue are stolidly square, with far too much dead space in the exchanges between Ben and Lucy. Neither Anne Victoria Banks nor Gian Luca Ricci has the comic gift or the vocal effortlessness the deceptively simple score demands. The Albany release, featuring the New York Chamber Ensemble, remains the...
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