Fatma Said’s debut album ‘El Nour’ rightly caused a stir on its release in 2020, earning the Egyptian soprano Gramophone Awards not only for Song but also as Young Artist of the Year. ‘I’ll be fascinated to see where Said goes next’, Mark Pullinger wrote in his review (12/20), and now with ‘Kaleidoscope’ we have something of an indication. ‘El Nour’ impressed not only with the beauty of Said’s singing but with a cross-cultural programme that placed Ravel, Saint-Saëns and Falla alongside Egyptian and Lebanese songs, classical and popular. ‘Kaleidoscope’ effectively builds on its diversity, though the emphasis has shifted and the stylistic range is wider.

A kaleidoscope, Said tells us in her booklet note, refracts an image through multiple prisms, though the object surveyed itself, of course, remains always the same. So the album aims at being, as she puts it, ‘a kaleidoscopic rendering of my voice as it inhabits … different characters and situations’. In a recent Gramophone interview (9/22), meanwhile, also with Mark Pullinger, she talked about her passion for Argentine tango, and ‘Kaleidoscope’ also surveys music associated with dance and dancing in an ambitious programme that embraces everything from a Spanish Renaissance minuet arranged by Joaquín Nin to Whitney Houston’s ‘I wanna dance with somebody (who loves me)’: operatic arias (Manon’s Gavotte, Juliette’s Waltz), excerpts from operetta and zarzuela, film and show numbers, tangos, jazz and pop songs are all thrown into what proves to be a remarkably heady mix.

Concerns that all this might be too much for one voice are by and large dispelled by idiomatic performances that are often sharply characterised. ‘Je t’aime quand même’ from Oscar Straus’s Les trois valses is meltingly lovely. Gounod’s Juliette, at her first ball, sounds impetuous and excited, and Eliza Doolittle dreams of dancing all night with almost breathless wonder. Marianne Crebassa joins Said for a sultry Barcarolle from Offenbach’s Hoffmann, their voices twining sensuously together. Some of the arrangements, many by pianist Tim Allhoff, are good, too. ‘Cheek to cheek’ becomes a jazz standard (forget Fred and Ginger for a while), and she takes ‘I wanna dance with somebody’ out of the disco and turns it into a heartbreaking power ballad of considerable force.

It’s all tremendous fun but there are occasional drawbacks, I’m afraid. The warmth of Said’s voice on ‘El Nour’ was consistently beguiling, though here on occasion you notice a touch of metal creep into the tone, making the ascent to top D in Manon’s Gavotte, for instance, a bit steely. You also can’t help but feel the way she snarls the disillusioned second stanza of Weill’s ‘Youkali’ in her chest register is perhaps pushing her voice too hard. The tangos, one of which she sings with new Arabic lyrics by Tamer Hussein, are all excellent, but when we get to the aria from Piazzolla’s María de Buenos Aires, I prefer the greater, no-holds-barred bravado of Luciana Mancini on Christopher Sprenger’s recording of the complete opera (Capriccio, 6/19). The orchestral playing is fine and there’s some excellent work from Allhoff and the multiple instrumentalists in the songs, though conductor Sascha Goetzel drives things hard on occasion, and the Bolero from Messager’s La fiancée en loterie is much brasher than Messager ever should be. Given that Said’s diction and way with words are exceptional, meanwhile, it seems utterly perverse of Warner only to give us the original texts and no translations.