The first item on this truly recherche selection (how many collectors have heard of all these singers, or even composers—I certainly hadn't) is the odd-diva-out: an Italian aria, sung in French by a Russian soprano. Korsoff's technique in Donizetti is remarkable, but to plunge into this post-Wagnerian, French realist style, I would advise a straight skip to tracks 16 and 17, the two arias from Fevrier's Monna Vanna, an early electric with orchestral accompaniment. This is significant for the elaborate orchestral textures are all-important in this repertoire, so it's worth preparing for the effort of imagination necessary on most of the older sides, the majority of which are acoustics, ten of them with piano accompaniment which sounds like the desperate improvisation of a sight-reading repetiteur.
Ansseau, who sings Prinzivalle in Mona Vanna, was according to Mary Garden, the possessor of the smallest waist of any tenor she'd known. Although he seems to stray slightly off pitch at the climax of the first extract, he has one of those apparently extinct compact French tenor voices and is very well recorded. In the first edition of Kobbe (1922), Fevrier's music was dismissed as ''commonplace'' but these arias, as well as the privately-recorded solo from Gismonda sung by Marguerite Namara, make a strong case for his work.
Namara, like Teyte and Garden, seems to bring an odd charm to the French style with her American accent she was well into her sixties when she made this disc but her personality fairly jumps out of the speakers—swooping portamentos, femme-fatale low notes and fearless messa di voce on high notes: a real heroine.
Among the tenors, Leon Escalais, at once stentorian and delicate, demonstrates the style of an earlier period, in the first of the three Gounod selections. Affre in the aria from Bruneau's opera based on a Zola story is vivid and strong, even more so the celebrated Muratore in the role of Thesee, which he created, in Massenet's Ariane. Rousseliere, Albers, Renaud and Caron all created the roles in which they are heard. Caron is probably the rarest, but the greatest charm among the sopranos is to be had from Germaine Feraldy, her familiar slightly fluttery soubrette melting in Bruneau's final opera, Virginie. Marie Rappold, a member of the ensemble at the Metropolitan in the 1900s, sings the Queen of Sheba's aria in English with formidable attack.
There are too many pleasures to elaborate, each track on this enthralling disc invites and deserves keen listening and study. The publishers are to be complimented for providing an exemplary booklet, with texts, translations, biographies and photographs of the singers and details of the early performances of each opera. A veritable jewel case.'