This is a lovely, if perhaps predictable, addition to the Prima Voce series, complementing their recital of Farrar in Italian opera (10/94) which included excerpts from Madama Butterfly, the opera in which she is most widely and affectionately remembered. In several respects, this French selection shows her to still better advantage. She was hardly Italianate in either voice or temperament, but the Manon and Mignon recordings are delightful, and if her tones have not the thickly lipsticked sensuality that some have thought obligatory for a Carmen or a Thais, others will be happy in its absence.
Her Carmen, which at one stage in her career seems to have run into excess, here appears as a model of effectiveness within the restraints of good musical and dramatic behaviour. There is indeed probably more restraint than effectiveness about the “Habanera”, which is mildly flirtatious and in no way dangerous. But the “Seguedille” is sheer enchantment (irresistible promise in that breathed “je l’aimerai” and the dreamily provocative reprise of “Pres des remparts”), while in the “Chanson boheme” we catch the energy of her personality as well as the carrying power of her by no means robust lyric soprano. That is heard at its best in Micaela’s aria recorded in 1908, when she sang this role to the far more Latin Carmen of Maria Gay. But how good it is then to come back to her own Carmen and find such conviction and vividness as she and Martinelli achieved without recourse to vulgarities of chest voice on her part or tearful self-pity on his. Martinelli’s Flower song is also something to hear, the passion finely contained within its unhurried lyric flow; and Amato’s Toreador has superb panache, with tense wide-eyed evocations of the bullring in the second verse and a suavely stylish pride in the refrain.
These are all (or nearly all, for I don’t much enjoy the Hoffmann Barcarolle duet with Scotti) cherishable records, of the kind that on some pleasant desultory evening with the gramophone (too few of those) one will feel a prompting to take down from the shelves. Seasoned collectors should not necessarily assume that they already have everything on the disc: there is, for instance, the unpublished “Je veux vivre” (Romeo et Juliette) from 1911, a performance of surprising delicacy and charm. The Prelude to Act 4 is there, too, in a recording from 1921 said to be by the orchestra of La Scala conducted by Toscanini, one of those legendary sessions which put him off the gramophone for a decade. If he had heard the results as cleanly defined as they are here, he might have thought again.'