Carrer: Despo

Day 200

Pavlos Carrer: Despo

Soloists

Sofia Festival Choir

Pasardjik Symphony Orchestra

Byron Fidentzis

I've reached day 200 in this project and also today represents another landmark. Although for the past 199 days I have  (apart from day 161) always listened to music I had not heard before the name of the composer was always famliar to me and I knew a little bit about him or her. But Pavlos Career was a complete unknown. I was looking for another nationalist opera, preferable from a country I had not featured in this survey to day, and also it needed to be short as today was a busy day. So I was delighted to land on this opera by the Greek Composer Pavlos Carrer which is in one act and which lasts just over half an hour.

Carrer (1829-1896) was one of the first, if not the first, Greek composers to write an opera. But to my ears there was very little Greek about it. It had all of the characteristics of early to middle period Verdi - strong rhythms, lot of energy, bit set piece solos, concerted passages and extrovert choruses. The only Greek element I noticed was a brief passage near the beginning which had a folk-like element to it, in the way that Italian or French composers of the time often introduced a touch of local colour.

The Greek element comes from the story - an episode in the war between the Greeks and the Turks in which the local women hide inside a castle and then when the castle is captured blow it and themselves up.  

I really enjoyed the opera, at least up to the last five minutes or so. It had that vigour and swagger of early Verdi and heard cold would I think have been assumed to be a previously unknown work of Verdi. But the last 5 minutes were a let down. I was expecting a dramatic finish but the composer's inspiration let him down and we had a few minutes of very conventional noisy battle music and then a rather brief and perfunctory ending. A pity really because the rest of the score was of high quality and would certainly hold the stage in a double bill with another short opera. Carrer wrote several operas, most of which have been recorded. It might be worth listening to one of the full length works at some point in the future.