Losing nothing of her freshness and individuality, Lucia Popp has delighted us in recent years with the judicious extension of hr repertoire, and it almost comes as a surprise now to recall that we first knew her as the Queen of Night. This recital contains much that is unexpected. Of the three characters in Le nozze di Figaro, Susanna is hers by nature, and the tenderness which she brings to ''Deh vieni non tardar'' works with the poise and lightness, the fastidiously clean placing and fine phrasing, to produce a performance very close to the ideal. Her Cherubino is brisk, her Countess aristocratic, yet the one lacks boyishness, the other roundness and warmth of tone. In Don Giovanni we would think of Popp as Zerlina, but here she sings the great arias of Anna and Elvira. We certainly have the pleasure of hearing the runs taken easily and ably, but again the tone quality is not right: too silvery and bright-edge to suggest the depth, the 'weight' of character these arias should convey. Fiordiligi, too, needs a touch of the dramatic soprano about her and Popp's ''Come scoglio'', though technically very assured, is a small-scale version. As for Vitellia's ''Non piu di fiori'', that was probably the most ill-advised, for the though nine-tenths of it goes well enough, there are crucial phrases ( ''veggo la morte a me avanzar'', for example) that lie too low for a soprano of this kind to have anything like the colour and sonority they need.
So we are left with the less surprising items in the programme, and these afte all are the best. ''L'amero, saro costante'' and ''Zeffiretti lusinghieri'' are serenely elegant, Costanze's ''Traurigkeit'' aria is sensitively shaded (the high notes no trouble at all) and, as I said, Susanna's ''Deh vieni non tardar'' is near perfection. I also used the word 'silvery', but it should be added that one is sometimes aware of an upper layer of some slightly more edgy metal; also (to change metaphors) the 'tooth-paste-squeeze' method is sometimes too much in evidence. The orchestra plays well but is a trifle too discreetly recorded.'