Here is one of the loveliest of all the century's sopranos, heard in a fine selection of her best recordings. In the famous international season at Covent Garden in 1924, the one which introduced London to Elisabeth Schumann, Lotte Lehmann, Maria Olczewska, Lauritz Melchior and Friedrich Schorr, all of whom became favourites over the next many years, it was Ivogun who excited the most wonder. She had a small voice that was of exquisite quality, used with a technical skill which even in those days people associated with the legendary past, and combined with an interpretative art that made Gilda's ''Caro nome'' in Rigoletto a revelation as the music of a shy youthful tenderness, and Zerbinetta's solo in Ariadne auf Naxos a thing of artistic fascination as well as purely vocal magic. Her records of those two solos, along with some of her Mozart, are included in various anthologies already published in Nimbus's Prima Voce series, and they are not repeated here. But there are treasures enough.
Among the operatic excerpts, the Traviata and Lustigen Weiber solos make an interesting contrast, the second showing the gaiety and energy of Ivogun's characterizations, the first a warm tone-colour and plenty of spontaneous impulse. A teasing way with the melody of Norina's ''So anch'io'' in Don Pasquale and a beguiling lilt in the Page's song in Les Huguenots are further pleasures, the latter almost persuading us that it must have been written by one of the masters of the Viennese waltz. Of that, she herself, among singers, is surely the High Mistress. The Strauss waltzes renew their freshness in her singing, brilliant in technique, gently charming in manner. Most joyous and dazzling of all is Kreisler's Liebesfreud: if in search of a demonstration-piece, this is it. Contrasting and equally to be treasured in their quite different way are the four folk-songs made in her last recording sessions in 1932. Immaculate copies of the originals have been used here, and they respond well to Nimbus's methods of transfer. It is a disc which every lover of singing should rejoice in.'