In her interview for BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Kyra Vayne told of the home-visiting fortune-teller who, having made (as it proved) a very good job of the main session, turned slowly and impressively at the front door and said that as life drew towards its close her voice would be reborn. Of course we all hope that she may live to be a hundred, but otherwise all has come to pass as the seer foretold. In 1992 The Record Collector published an article; in 1995 Preiser brought out a first CD (6/95); in January 1996 the almost (but never quite) forgotten singer celebrated her eightieth birthday; and now comes a second volume. This, like the first, draws on material from her private collection and, if the quality of recorded sound is somewhat variable, that of the voice itself is remarkably consistent. Among the choice of records to be taken to that famous desert island was one of Rosa Ponselle’s, and the castaway exclaimed both about the beauty of that fabulous voice and its likeness to her own. Something of Ponselle’s sumptuous midsummer richness was indeed hers, and, with it, came reserves of depth and flashes of grandeur.
Nor is this a second-best collection of leftovers. In fact I find it more consistently impressive than its predecessor. Of special interest is the performance of Berlioz’s La mort de Cleopatre, intense in feeling and imagination, finely articulated, and thrilling in the rich chest-voice of the Meditation, “Grands Pharaohs” (the passage which Boieldieu, one of Berlioz’s examiners in the Prix de Rome, later admitted to have been quite beyond him). Magnificent too is the recital of songs by some of the less familiar Russian song-writers: these are among the latest recordings, and a charmingly lightened, smiling and piano-accompanied Musetta is among the earliest, dated c1945.
In his notes, Earl Okin very candidly and modestly refers to a criticism of the previous volumes: that his notes there failed to include recording-dates at all. Perhaps mindful of the likely difficulties, the review in Gramophone refrained from complaint on that occasion, but now that attention has been drawn to it I think something does have to be said. For example: if, as stated in The Record Collector, the Russian songs were broadcast, it should not be all that hard to find the date. The Cleopatre was broadcast, with the BBC Scottish Orchestra under Norman Del Mar, on August 25th, 1961. The notes give it as “c1962”, and claim that the “long-forgotten manuscript” had been discovered by Colin Tilney, who is Kyra Vayne’s accompanist in the Russian songs. According to Grove, Cleopatre was published in 1903. It seems unlikely that there would have been no performance in France (cf. “certainly it had not been heard this century”), but what we have here may well be the first performance in the UK, and a premiere recording. That is distinction enough, and it deserves an authoritative musicological note.JBS