Our dialogue with Ermonela Jaho has been ongoing for many years, at least since 2021, when the great singer won the ICMA Award in the Vocal Music category with her recital Anima rara, released by the Opera Rara label. Despite the restrictions of the Covid period, she came to Vaduz for our gala and stunned the audience with a captivating performance of Violetta’s ‘Addio del passato’ (Goodbye to the Past). So much so that the jury unanimously decided to nominate her as Artist of the Year for the 2023 ICMA edition, held in Wroclaw. Ermonela has since become a sort of honorary member of the ICMA family: after the two interviews conducted for the aforementioned occasions, Jury member Nicola Cattò (Musica) return to speak with the great Albanian soprano, who once again won first prize in the Vocal Music category with her recording of Donizetti’s melodies, with Carlo Rizzi on piano, again for Opera Rara.
How did you get involved in the Donizetti complete works project?
As you know, Opera Rara’s philosophy is to bring back forgotten works by great composers of the past: it was Roger Parker, in particular, who rediscovered these Donizetti romances, and he found more than 400 for different voice types. I immediately became passionate about the project because I feel at home with Opera Rara; I’m their ambassador: I’ve been working with them for a long time on the verismo repertoire, to which I now dedicate myself assiduously. At first, I was a bit skeptical about the quality of these works: they’re often very simple, they’re not the high-level Donizetti we find in the most famous operas, but the melody is there, the feeling is there, and it was right to make them known. We’re filling a gap in our knowledge of this composer. I’ve studied 42 of them, and I must say it was a lot of work. Most of them lack dynamic markings, and when the same melody has to be repeated three or four times on different texts, you have to constantly invent new details and expressive alternatives. Maestro Rizzi and I worked on this to give these pieces the dignity they deserve. There are romances in Venetian and Neapolitan, which are very entertaining and set to simple, popular texts, but also some derived from literary masterpieces like the Divine Comedy. Those in French, on the other hand, are more heartfelt, more intense, perhaps because they were created within literary and artistic circles, to whom Donizetti brought them as occasional gifts (as Roger Parker told me: this is why some are completely missing the piano parts, which we had to reconstruct). They have a certain melancholy, a pervasive sadness. I think these romances can be useful for young singers as an exercise: they are technically simple and help develop expressiveness and spoken singing, telling a story, however simple it may be.
When you do a complete recording, it’s inevitable that some pieces will be of lower quality: how do you deal with a score you don’t believe in?
It happens, it’s undeniable, that you sing songs that don’t resonate with you. In this case, the artist must idealize, must delve into their own subconscious, to make the audience believe that the value of the music is much greater than it actually is: they work hard on dynamics, on colors, because the human ear craves variety. In this way, they make the music more beautiful than it really is.
Many romances are in strophic form: did you add variations or embellishments?
Not many. The philosophy was to bring these romances to the public as they were written, with minimal changes. We worked, as I mentioned before, on the dynamics, which are used to vary pieces that can last over ten minutes: the idea was to tell a story as if we were speaking to children.
What’s the difference between the Italian and French ones?
The Italian ones are direct, unfiltered, even in the singing style; the French ones, on the other hand, have an intimate, internalized, delicate atmosphere. Less explosive, if I may say so.
What is your relationship with Donizetti’s theatre? You sang Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena, Elisir, Don Pasquale…
True, I’ve encountered several of his works in my career: we know how prolific Donizetti was and how eventful his life was. But he was certainly a true genius, with a keen theatrical instinct, and his works display a clearly bravura quality. Donizetti’s coloratura, however, always has an expressive purpose. Donizetti’s theatre is complete, capturing every human nuance.
