Isaac Stern Auditorium, Thursday, October 11, 2001 8:00 PM, Great Artists

"...serious and exquisite artistry" The Times, London

José Carreras, Tenor
David Giménez, Conductor (Carnegie Hall Debut)

PROGRAM

• PASQUALE MARIO COSTA "Luna Nova"
• PASQUALE MARIO COSTA "Era di Maggio"
• BERNSTEIN Overture from Candide
• ENRICO TOSELLI "Serenata"
• STANISLAS GASTALDON "Musica proibita"
• VERDI Overture to I vespri siciliani
• VERDI Brindisi
• VERDI L`esule
• FALLA Interlude and Dance No. 1 from La vida breve
• FALLA Seven Spanish Popular Songs
• JERONIMO GIMÉNEZ Intermezzo from La boda de Luis Alonso
• SIMEON JOSÉ SERRANO "Canción húngara" from Alma de Dios
• JOSÉ RIBAS "Rosó"

Encores:

• ACAMPORA Vierno
• KERN All the things you are
• CARDILLO Core n`grato
• VALENTE Passione
• RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN Some Enchanted Evening
• LARA Granada

PROGRAM NOTES (By John W. Freeman)

Pasquale Mario Costa (1858-1933), a native of Taranto near Naples, was a major player in the development of the Italian romanza. As late as the 1920s, he hit his stride as an operetta composer, producing four such scores for Rome, Turin, and Milan. In between, he kept up a flow of songs, pantomimes, ballet music, marches, and piano pieces.

The Overture to Candide, by Leonard Bernstein (1918-90), is one of the numbers to survive unchanged from the earliest version (1956) of this popular musical, revised in 1973. The overture, rhythmically catchy, irrepressibly spirited, became a signature piece for Bernstein, who also recorded his West Side Story with José Carreras in the cast.

"Serenata (Rimpianto)" is the signature piece of Enrico Toselli (1883-1926), whose own life reads like the plot of an operetta or movie. A Florentine, he spent his early career as a concert pianist, performing as far afield as North America. Notoriety was added to his fame when in 1907 he married Archduchess Luise Antoinette-Marie of Austria-Tuscany, who had set scandal in motion a few years earlier by abandoning her first husband. She and Toselli separated in 1912. Francesco Bussi writes in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians that the piece "was often taken as a reference to Toselli`s unhappy love, although its date of publication makes this impossible."

Similarly, "Musica proibita" is the piece by which Stanislao Gastaldon (1861-1939) is remembered. Born in Turin, later an adoptive Florentine, Gastaldon turned out some 300 songs, plus military band music and piano pieces, and also made his mark in the field of opera.

Though several tenor roles by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) have been in the repertory of José Carreras, this program`s selection from a Verdi opera is orchestral -- the overture to I vespri siciliani (1855). Verdi also wrote a handful of songs, from which the tenor has chosen "Brindisi" (1835) and "L`esule" (1839).

The importance to Carreras of Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) dates back to a 1958 performance of Falla`s El retablo de Maese Pedro in Barcelona, in which the eleven-year-old Carreras made his professional debut in the boy treble role of the narrator, El Trujamán. For the Siete canciones populares espańolas (1915), Falla arranged existing Spanish folk songs but, like Béla Bartók and Benjamin Britten in their folk-song settings, transformed the material in a highly personal way. The orchestrations used here are by Luciano Berio (b. 1925), the modern Italian-born composer active in the US since the 1950s.

La boda de Luis Alonso (1897) was written by Jerónimo Giménez (1854-1923) as a sequel to his previous zarzuela, El baile de Luis Alonso, both about the celebrated Spanish dancer Luis Alonso. In his youth, Giménez had played violin in the orchestra of the Teatro Principal in his home city, Seville. After a French sojourn, he visited Italy, eventually returning home to Madrid.

Another specialist in the género chico was José Serrano (1873-1941), a native of Valencia. He pursued his early studies there before moving on to Madrid, where his teachers included the major zarzuela composers Tomás Bretón and Ruperto Chapí. In addition to some liturgical music, Serrano is credited with about a hundred works for the theater, of which the zarzuela Alma de Dios appeared in late 1907.

The hopeful love song "Rosó" ("Pel teu amor"), to verses in the Catalan language by Miguel Poal Aregall, was composed in 1922 by Josep (José) Ribas (1882-1934), who contributed several works to the relatively obscure genre of Catalan zarzuela. As natives of Barcelona, both Carreras and this evening`s conductor, David Giménez, are fellow countrymen of Ribas.

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