AMOR, VIDA DE MI VIDA—THE ZARZUELA CONCERT • Plácido Domingo (ten); Jesús López-Cobos, cond; Ana María Martínez (sop); Mozarteum O, Salzburg • UNITEL 2072478 (DVD: 103:07 Text and Translation) Live: Salzburg 8/9–10/2007

CHUECA El bateo: Prelude. TORROBA La maravilla: Amor, vida de mia vida. La chulapona: Tienes razón, amingo. La marchenera: Tres horas antes del día. Luisa Fernanda: Cállate, corazón; Luché la fe por el triunfo; En mi tierra extremeña. CARNÉ El niño judio: De España vengo. FALLA El amor brujo: Ritual Fire Dance. The Three-Cornered Hat: Jota. SERRANO Los claveles: Romanza. La canción de olvido: Junto al Puente de la peña. OTERO La del Soto del Parral: Quiero desterrar de tu pecho el temor. BELLIDO La boda de Luis Alonso: Interlude. PENELLA Don Gil de Alcalá: Habanera Duet. El gato montés: Soleá . . . Me llamabas, Rafaeliyo? SOROZÁBAL La tabernera del Puerto: En un país de fibula. CHAPÍ Las hijas del Zebedeo: Al pensar en el dueño de mis amores. LECUONA Maria la O: Mulata infeliz, tu vida acabó. LEHÁR The Merry Widow: Lippen schweigen

What a sheer delight this is, from beginning to end. Originally this was scheduled as a concert for two tenors to sing Zarzuela arias—Domingo and Rolando Villazón. In the end, the younger tenor had to cancel because of his vocal crisis, and the old man of 68 (if you accept his official birth year of 1941) went on in glorious voice. Ana Maria Martínez, who often sings concerts with Domingo, was more than an adequate fill-in. She has a natural feel for this music, as does Domingo (and conductor López-Cobos as well), and a very attractive lyric soprano voice.

The arias and duets are melodious, lively, and infectious. They were chosen to provide sufficient variety of mood, and the Salzburg audience is clearly ecstatic all evening long. (This was videotaped over two concerts, so some editing is involved, but one is not aware of it.)

Domingo remains one of the miracles of our age. At the opening of the first aria the voice shows signs of wear—the tone lacks its usual liquid beauty and there is more than a hint of wobble. You think to yourself, “Finally, after a half-century of singing, the end is clearly here.” Within fewer than five minutes, that thought is gone as the old vocal gold returns. For the rest of the concert, he is in terrific voice. There are no high Cs or Bs required by this music, to be sure, but you would be hard pressed to name a single tenor you would rather hear sing it. His continued clear love for singing, after so many years, is almost as miraculous as the condition of his voice. He, Martínez, and López-Cobos are all clearly having the time of their lives, although López-Cobos seems surprisingly restrained in the orchestral excerpts, when a bit more abandon would have been welcome. Domingo’s soft singing in the aria from Otero’s La del Soto del Parral is magical, and his high A♭ at the end of it is rock solid and ringing. Throughout the concert, Domingo seems totally at ease, exhibiting flexibility of color, dynamics, and phrasing. Martínez doesn’t seem quite as free as Domingo, perhaps because she was replacing Villazón, but she sings beautifully and with idiomatic expression, and as the evening goes on, she becomes more and more expressive. Her encore from Lecuona’s Maria la O is exquisite—beautifully shaded and sung with gleaming high notes.

Karina Fibich’s video direction is straightforward. In the orchestral numbers, the camera, happily, lingers on some shots rather than jerking about every measure, and for the vocal numbers there is the right balance between holding still and providing some visual variety. The sound quality is very good—perfectly balanced so that one always hears the singers, but the orchestra is not relegated to the background. There are subtitles in a number of languages, but it would have been nice if Unitel had provided some dramatic context for these scenes. We don’t learn anything about the characters or the situations in which they find themselves. Nonetheless, this is a wonderful DVD, and is enthusiastically recommended to fans of the zarzuela or Domingo. (Even the Lehár encore doesn’t seem out of place in the evening.)

FANFARE: Henry Fogel