>From time to time, especially on long holiday weekends, shuffling the
piles of CDs and DVDs awaiting your attention is a good idea.  Those
on the bottom *may* have more to offer than you'd expect on the initial
triage.

I didn't bother to remove the plastic on receipt from a 2002 DVD set
from Arena Sferisterio Macerata (?) of "L'Elisir d'Amore," featuring
Valeria Esposito as Adina, Aquiles Machado as Nemorino, Erwin Schrott
as Dulcamara, and Enrico Marrucci as Belcore.  Never heard of them...
or of the Macerata Festival...  or the conductor Niels Muus - so to the
bottom of the pile it went.

Today's arbitrary shuffle moved the disc to the player, and...  no,
I am not packing to catch the next performance in Macerata, won't rave
about Muus and his lively but thoroughly unexceptional orchestra, but
found those four singers very much worth attention.  They are young,
passionate, and seem to enjoy singing - a phenomenon not as frequent as
one would like.

Esposito appears to be the most experienced and she is impressive,
especially with her stage work, the Belcore and Dulcamara are excellent,
but it's Machado who makes the biggest impression.  With the girth and
bulk of the young Pavarotti, Machado doesn't sound at all like him.  His
is a solid, well-placed voice, but without the individuality, the special
quality of That Voice.

What Machado - visibly handicapped by weight already, in his early
30s - does have is a constancy of reliable voice production, beauty
("standarized" as it may be) of tone, and relative (but for the weight)
effortlessness.  The Venezuelan is in fine company, of new "Latin American
tenors" - Juan Diego Florez, Jose Cura, Marcelo Alvarez, Rolando Villazon,
Ramon Vargas...  and probably a dozen others we just haven't heard about.

It's OK to wait until the next long weekend, but eventually, you may
want to see this performance, and - more emphatically - look out for
these singers in other productions.

Janos Gereben
www.sfcv.org
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