With her strong, vibrant tone and wide-awake personality, Jennifer Larmore captures attention immediately, and with a reassuring degree of consistency she rewards it. Her programme here is a rewarding one in itself. The arias are all excerpts from opera or oratorio, and as they are all essentially dramatic compositions they have to be referred back to context; yet even so they stand readily enough on their own merits, and the singer is clearly well aware of the characters and their situations.
This is one of her great merits. The voice and manner change appropriately with each item: the grand declamation and fearful urgency of the Finta semplice aria gives way to the lightness of smiling youth in Cherubino's ''Voi che sapete'', and that in turn to the sadly meditative tenderness of the condemned Sesto in La clemenza di Tito. In Handel, the serenity of ''Ombra mai fu'' is finely contrasted with the intensity and brilliance of Dejanira's madness in Hercules. With this adaptability of dramatic character goes a mastery of technique that enables her to face the great tests which these arias present. Her scales in ''Dopo notte'' are rapid, clean and even; her legato in its contrasting middle section and her feeling for the buoyancy of rhythm in this most exhilarating of Handel's allegros combine to delight the many listeners who have found in her one of the brightest of emerging talents in the last few years.
Two misgivings arise. One is that the top of the voice, as heard on this and other recent recordings, seems in danger of wearing rather hard and raw. The other comes in the form of that indefinable intimation of something wanting, the kind of thing that urges comparisons. So, after ''Smanie implacabili'' I took down the old 1954 Karajan Cosi fan tutte (EMI, 12/88), where Dorabella is Nan Merriman; then, after ''Voi che sapete'' I played Elisabeth Schumann, and after the first Tito aria Anne Sofie von Otter. As usual, they pointed clearly: the missing element in Larmore's singing is a kind of delicacy – not a question of singing softly (she does that readily and well), but of sensibility. Merriman's ''Smanie'' is less grandly monolithic, more human, more imaginative in its light-and-shade. Schumann's Cherubino, 'straight' to start with, develops its natural give-and-take in impulse and permits the light caress of a judicious portamento. Von Otter's Sesto is more interior, more responsive to the aria as an unfolding soliloquy.
Most completely satisfying here is probably Rinaldo's lament, beautifully sung with ever-growing intensity. Much else is exciting, especially in anger (as in La finta giardiniera) or resolution (Mitridate). The Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, under Lopez-Cobos's slightly rigid direction, play with style and skill. The absence of English textual translations is mitigated by Hugh Graham's exemplary notes, which neatly place the excerpts in context.'