Heavily influenced by Gershwin, Thomson and Puccini, with a dash here and there of Copland, Hindemith and Weill, Marc Blitzstein's Regina is the most melodramatic and fierce of all the 'Broadway operas' of the 1930s and 1940s. This veritable zuppa Inglese of harmonic and stylistic allusions poses a challenge to its interpreters which John Mauceri meets full on, in what seems to me his most successful recording so far. The Scottish Opera Orchestra and Chorus, fresh from the 1991 Glasgow staging, support the studio cast only one of whom appeared in the production Theresa Merritt as Addie.
The central role of Regina Giddens, the fading southern belle, using her charms to manipulate and control her monstrous brothers and her own put-upon family, is surely the biggest soprano star role in American opera. As Tallulah Bankhead Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor have shown in Hellmann's play, The Little Foxes, upon which Blitzstein based the opera, there's only one way with Regina—out-and-out bitch. Katherine Ciesinski is suitably throaty and forceful in the scene of confrontation with the brothers at the end—the orchestral writing here is so over the top that it would take a very strong listener not to succumb to its shock tactics. Her waltz song ''The best thing of all'', a tune that once heard is hard to get out of one's mind, is delivered with as much glitter in her tone as she can muster.
This latest version of the much edited score, restored from the composer's manuscripts by Mauceri and Tommy Krasker, not only reverts to the mezzo range for Regina—as was originally planned—but includes all the jazz-band ''Chinky-pin'' music: Hellmann objected to a lot of this, but the structure of the opera requires it, the whole drama moves inevitably towards the final scene, with its mother-daughter clash played out over the field-workers' song ''A new day's a' comin' ''.
The one thing, like so many other opera composers, that Blitzstein faltered over was his use of ragtime or jazz. There is even a character called Jazz, but when Miss Birdie asks the housekeeper Addie ''Where'd you learn that?'' and she replies, ''Just made it up, they call it the blues'', this listener's reaction is ''Oh, yeah?''—it sounds more like a Viennese lullaby.
If Regina can only be played brilliantly, hard and loud, the other female characters, her daughter Alexandra, and sister-in-law, the sad secret-drinker Birdie, offer substantial dramatic possibilities. Those two remarkable singing actresses, Angelina Reaux as Alexandra and Sheri Greenawald as Birdie, are both excellent. The opening scene of Act 3 in which they and Addie are joined by Regina's husband Horace, sung by Samuel Ramey, in the quartet ''Listen to the sound of the rain'', followed by Birdie's aria, the longest solo in the piece, creates a quiet stillness which sets the scene for the death-scene and denouement.
A lot of the underscored recitative is just heightened dialogue, yet the most operatic passages grow naturally out of it, and Hellmann's characters remain as nastily fascinating now as they were 50 years ago. Although it loses a good deal without a stage picture this splendid recording ought to make new friends for Blitzstein's still neglected work. Young listeners brought up on a diet of Hollywood, rock, jazz and opera will have none of the difficulties with the style of Regina that audiences in New York in 1949 were said to have encountered.'