Norman Dello Joio had large shoes to fill when he considered an opera on the subject of Joan of Arc; both Verdi and Rossini wrote Joan of Arc works, not to mention the plethora of non-operatic works from Shakespeare to George Bernard Shaw and beyond. Dello Joio returned repeatedly to the idea, writing a full-length opera called The Triumph of St. Joan in 1950, withdrawing it but extracting a three-movement Triumph of Saint Joan Symphony from it the following year, starting from scratch with a 1956 opera for NBC television, The Trial at Rouen (remember when opera was on network TV in prime time?), and reverting to the Triumph of St. Joan title for a fourth work in 1959. The 1956 Trial at Rouen is heard here, prefaced by the 1951 symphony. Dello Joio wrote the libretto himself, discarding his earlier collaboration with music writer Joseph Machlis. It's not perfect; for one thing, interesting characters disappear after the first of the two scenes, but the character of Joan herself, depicted at first in her prison cell and then during the trial, is convincingly drawn as a human figure struggling with her decisions rather than as a one-dimensional fanatic. Dello Joio's music rises to the considerable challenges here as he manages to combine Joan's inward world with the high drama of the story as it builds to its conclusion. He forges a tonal but highly chromatic idiom that clarifies harmonically really only at the end when Joan accepts her fate, and his treatment of the orchestra is dense and expressive. Heather Buck, as Joan of Arc, is impressive in her immersion in the role, and she leads a strong cast of Odyssey Opera Company singers who by and large make the libretto included with the physical CDs unnecessary. The musicians of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project under conductor Gil Rose are confident in music that must have been uncharacteristically traditional for them. A final attraction is the sound, recorded at the acoustically fine Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts, based on an earlier semi-staged Boston production. It would be easy to imagine other small companies or collegiate groups (Dello Joio's first effort was written for Sarah Lawrence College) taking up the opera anew, and that in itself is strong testimony in favor of the work done here.
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