Ever since her debut recital five years ago, which AB hailed as ‘one of the most exciting ... from any opera singer for a long time’ (Campion, 11/95), Inessa Galante has been winning golden opinions. She is indeed a remarkable artist, but also an uneven one. AB noted a need to use words and especially consonants to enhance expression, and here, for all her sensitivity with phrasing in metrically uneven verse, she can still too often lose verbal clarity. Listeners are not helped by a booklet that finds seven pages for three-language blurbs about the artists and even about the Wigmore Hall, but none for the original texts. A further reservation is that, when under pressure on high notes, her voice falls prone to a fast vibrato, too regularly applied, which she loses in all registers with her softer singing.
This can be ravishing. The close of Glinka’s pretty song about the lark, Tchaikovsky’s ‘Cradle song’ and his touching piece about the girl plucked like a blade of grass and withering in the embrace of a horrible old man, as well as Medtner’s setting of Pushkin’s little elegy to the withered roses, are all beautifully handled, not least thanks to Roger Vignoles’s sensitive piano playing. He has an intelligent feeling for these songs, and sympathetic musicianship in support of Galante’s performances, but also the virtuosity demanded by Rachmaninov’s ‘Spring waters’. He makes the most of the two operatic excerpts, valuable only in that they kindle the wish to hear Galante in, especially, The Queen of Spades. The recording is very fair, though it cannot help picking up contributions from one or two bronchially challenged members of the audience.'