This follow up to Roberta Alexander's Etcetera disc of Barber songs with piano (9/88) will be welcomed by the composer's growing band of devotees. Alexander has her admirers too, and only those familiar with Leontyne Price's sublime and sultry Knoxville or her devastating account of the scenes from Antony and Cleopatra will find much to criticize. De Waart neither indulges nor supercharges Barber's music as Schippers did for RCA on that long-deleted LP (8/69), and, rather against my expectations, I found his more relaxed approach just as compelling in its own way. Alexander's voice is not as large as Price's; this is arguably an advantage in Knoxville which she sings relatively straight (though much less so than Eleanor Steber—on CBS—who commissioned the work), but she can sound strained when Barber demands bold declamation at the extremes of the range. As Anthony Burton points out in the notes, Barber himself trained as a singer—one of the very few composers to have done so since Renaissance times. And yet his vocal writing is always a challenge, by no means easy to bring off when, like Britten, he liked to play to the strengths of specific performers.
Those who admire the American composer when he's being flagrantly conservative—and preferably regressing to childhood if not the womb—will skip the forced chromaticism of Andromache's Farewell (the definitive CBS recording by Martina Arroyo is both more comfortably sung and more scorchingly intense) and relish the simpler songs from earlier in his career, in particular the exquisite Sure on this Shining Night. Barber's setting may be modelled on Robert Schumann, but in its orchestrated form there are portents of Knoxville, which also sets a text by James Agee. Nocturne, again from the Op. 13 group, is based on a love poem by Frederic Prokosch who reports hearing none other than Sir Thomas Beecham singing it informally, to his own accompaniment.
The recording itself is beautifully engineered without being entirely consistent. There's always plenty of space around the recessed orchestral image, but the soloist is occasionally masked by the resonance. The military imagery of Joyce's I Hear an Army could have done with a closer focus on (and less vibrato from) the singer. On the other hand, the poignant aria, ''Must the winter come so soon?'' (from Barber's first full-length opera, Vanessa) finds the microphones closer and Alexander effectively scaling down her voice to impersonate the young niece of the protagonist. It's a pity the number is faded out so abruptly given that the composer himself published it separately. But these are minor reservations when much of the music is little known, although this must be the first time that all Barber's operas have been simultaneously available complete on disc in the UK. Etcetera supply full texts and deserve high praise for another adventurous issue.'