The market may have something to say about this. The first track and the last are just the sort of thing it likes. Both are settings of the Ave Maria (as, indeed, are most of the other tracks). In the first, women’s voices add an ethereal but by no means sexless element to the religious associations of the organ, and the solo soprano’s voice enters, rather like Tosca’s in the cantata, thrillingly the star. The music itself, by Paula Licite, offers a choice of idioms, none of them requiring too much by way of concentration but combining an accustomed pleasure with a sense of something new. The last is listed as Caccini’s Ave Maria and will assuredly achieve fame as the theme music for an airline or pizza commercial before long: it carries a strong suggestion of Jerome Kern (“You are the honeyed breath of evening”) while shimmering in candlelight and voluptuous piety. It might be interesting to inspect the composer’s (“c1600”) manuscript.
Otherwise it can hardly be said that the music excites curiosity of any kind. The three ‘cantatas’ by Jazeps Vitols are said to date from 1935 and the years immediately following, but if a typographical error had substituted an 8 for the 9 little about the sound of the pieces would have made it seem unlikely; they have perhaps the dignity of a sincere plainness. The various Ave Marias are not such as to invite instant replay, and Puccini’s Salve regina seems just about to get beyond the first page of the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana (which it antedates) when it stops.
All items are performed to accompaniments played on the organ of Riga Cathedral, which one might conclude to be an instrument of limited resources till reading the note which tells of its “4 manuals, 124 registers and 6718 pipes”. Dull registration and stodgily coupled pedals create the kind of impression an imaginative player would hope to avoid on an average parish church two-manual. Still, there is the beautiful voice, and just as well too, for without it the entertainment would be barren indeed. Inessa Galante, known to most of us first through a disc praised by AB as “one of the most exciting debut recitals from any opera singer for a long time” (Campion, 11/95), is recorded live, in a way that brings a vivid and exciting sense of contact. A slightly tremulous quality sometimes enters on high notes, but for the most part her tone and style manage to combine warmth with a shining clarity so that she impresses as a singer of memorable individuality and one who induces a thirst for more.'