All Music Guide

The nearest nineteenth century equivalent to American college students' semesters in Europe was the Grand Tour, a trip to the Mediterranean countries to see the glories of Renaissance cultures undertaken by well-educated 20-somethings from bourgeois England and other northern countries. And at the center of the Grand Tour was Venice, a living museum even in the nineteenth century. This little album of "Souvenirs of Venice" has sold well, perhaps in tandem with the various circulating exhibitions that have similarly explored the impact and meaning of Venice among visual artists. Reissued on the budget Helios label, this 1983 recording makes a fine gift for anyone headed to Italy or reliving a trip there. Venice offered the composer a host of ideas from which to choose -- gondoliers, mandolins, an exotic Italian street dialect, or just one of the planet's most charmed twilight cityscapes -- and most of them are represented here in a set of songs stretching chronologically from Beethoven (setting a folk song) to Reynaldo Hahn. The program brings together a group of little-known songs and does a good enough job of putting listeners in a nineteenth century recital seat that they are thoroughly revivified. It's safe to say, for example, that Taneyev's "Venetsiya noch'yu," with its mandolin-and-piano accompaniment, hasn't crowded the CD bins, but it's absolutely lovely. Some songs, such as Rossini's "La regata veneziana" with its vocal trio, give you an idea of what Gilbert and Sullivan were parodying in "The Gondoliers," but that goes to show the album's effectiveness in scene-setting. Tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson is attractive and romantic, with just the right intensity level. The very early digital sound was well above average for its time, and this is in every way a superior program of songs that cannot be classified as either serious or light. James Manheim

Time Out New York

Anthony Rolfe Johnson['s] exquisitely modulated lyric tenor ravishes the ear in Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Hahn rarities. David Shengold