What is on offer with this 2024 release -- recorded between 1994 and 2010 -- from the
Naxos
label is an unfinished opera by a composer,
Spyridon Samaras
, who is little known these days. It was realized from sketches by the conductor here,
Byron Fidetzis
. Listeners with a pile of new releases contending for their attention might reasonably wonder if this album is worth their time. The only rejoinder is that the music here is entirely distinctive.
Fidetzis
has been championing
Samaras
' music for several decades, and the album is an installment in his campaign.
wrote no fewer than a dozen operas (including the unfinished
Tigra
, which exists only in the first act heard here), the majority in Italian and premiered in Milan, Italian opera's heartland. He also composed three Greek operettas that sound like they would be worth reviving. He studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, absorbed the late Romantic French style, was influenced by
Puccini
like many others of his time, and retained a Greek flavor in his tonalities. It is this last that makes the fragment worth hearing, and
' reconstruction is idiomatic to the time (1911). The heated love story, set in medieval Venice, reflects the Eastern flavors of the setting, and the various elements of
' background cohere into a dramatically persuasive unit. The opera gets strong performances from an all-Greek cast, with Bulgarian choristers and instrumentalists, and for every listener who finds the whole thing completely over the top, there will be another for whom it works. The program is rounded out with two orchestral works of greater harmonic clarity; the suite
Epinikeia
is stylistically akin to
'
Olympic Hymn
of 1896, and both works anticipate the broadly popular Greek school of the 20th century.
' sound here is no great shakes, with balances seriously off in places, but this album is a sleeper that will introduce many hearers to a composer little-known outside Greece. ~ James Manheim