Impressed as most listeners will have been by this admirable singer's work in the opera house and on records, the programme here and the degree of accomplishment in her performances will still come as a surprise to many. Within the space of about four years Cheryl Studer has become established as one of the leading sopranos now before the public, and she already has a substantial list of recordings to her credit. Yet even in the Italian repertoire (Verdi's Requiem and Attila and let's not quibble about Rossini's Guillaume Tell) she has taken her place among essentially lyric sopranos, while her participation in the German operas (Tannhauser, Die Walkure, Die Frau ohne Schatten) has suggested a move towards the lyric-dramatic. On this disc she appears in what we think of as the coloratura repertoire, and the accompanying note tells that this is the direction her career is expected to take over the next few years. So far so good.
There are, however, more ways than one of pressing a voice beyond limits that are good for it, and I personally would not be too happy about hearing of a schedule which made heavy demands on the top notes. In these recordings she gives the high dominant as the penultimate note of the Traviata, Lucia di Lammermoor and Semiramide arias. She takes them well and I daresay we would have felt a shade cheated or disappointed without them; yet they're not the crowning glory as they were with Sutherland or Tetrazzini, and the top E concluding ''Una voce poco fa'' is rather uncomfortably reminiscent of that thin sound we used to hear at the end of our old records when a singer (like Frieda Hempel, let's say) wanted to show she could do it but would perhaps have been better advised not to. Hempel's career might indeed be worth pondering, for she was a soprano with a comparable breadth of repertoire; also with a warm lyric voice and great technical accomplishment inducing her to spend more time than was entirely wise on the ledger lines.
Still, wisdom, or at any rate a thoughtful nature, is one of the qualities that Studer's singing of the Traviata aria, in particular, does suggest. She follows the changes of mood and catches a fine depth of dramatic feeling at ''esser amato amando'' and ''sola, abbandonata''. More remarkably there is a fine fund of humanity in the exceptionally lovely ''Ah, non credea''. The fioriture of ''Bel raggio'' and ''Regnava nel silenzio'' have a delicious way of expressing little ripples of internal excitement; and a magically affectionate touch brings out most imaginatively the special beauty of the ''gioje sogna'' phrases near the end of Lucrezia's aria. In all of this I imagine that Gabriele Ferro will have played some part, excellent conductor of Rossini and Donizetti as he is; accompaniments are indeed finely played, though one could wish that a chorus had been brought in for Norma and Semiramide.'