Scotto has never been content with just touting a few roles round from centre to centre. She has responded to the challenge of the new and then attempted to interpret the music in hand from the heart. So it is not surprising that, at a comparatively late stage in her career, she should be having a look at French repertory previously outside her ken. Quite apart from that, it is good to have a recital that gets away from the regular list of arias most sopranos essay on disc. That said, one could have wished that Scotto had attempted some of this programme when her voice was still in securer state. In the first items all goes reasonably well until the singer has to sustain a line at anything like forte: such is the effort called for from Scotto in the three classical arias that she has to sacrifice words m the sheer effort to keep the voice going. The results are hardly beneficial to the music in hand, creating a sense of effort rather than of ease.
The lovely Tell aria, always welcome when sung in the original, is graciously phrased, but the line is too often uneven and the diction occluded. ''Il faut partir'' is something else: here Scotto's ability, born of long experience, in fining away her tone to suit a Donizettian melody and then filling it with pathos is once again exemplified and the advantage is repeated in the similar piece, a prayer, from the Meyerbeer opera. In between, Scotto tears a passion to tatters in ''O mon Fernand'', and the ride is bumpy.
Though it is interesting to hear ''Dich teure Halle'' in the French version of Tannhauser, used for Paris, this isn't Scotto's music. By contrast, she finds a wonderful breadth of expression for both ''Adieu, forets'' and ''Pleurez, mes yeux''. The first is sung with just the right plaintive sadness the second with a tear in the voice as the piece demands, though it has to be said that Callas, who favoured this aria in her later years, was even more impassioned and made more of the words. I derived enough pleasure from these items in the second half of the recital to console me for doubts about the first. The accompaniments are decent rather than very discerning. The recording is a shade on the reverberant side, which may account for some of the indistinctness in the enunciation.'