Just a very little of my old feeling that Steber was a superb singing-machine remains after hearing this disc. Throughout these almost faultlessly accomplished performances the mind is occupied constantly with admiration for the excellence in all the technical essentials of singing. There can hardly have been, for instance, a cleaner singer than Steber. There is never a smudged or awkwardly taken interval, and her accuracy in staccato and the placing of notes is uncanny. She commands a real legato, an evenness of production which is habitual, as an absolute first condition of success in her art. The voice is whole and indivisible, with no register breaks, and no weakness in the commonly vulnerable areas. And, though it was not a voice I personally 'grew up with', I'm sure there is an individuality about it that could well be a precious inner possession, as are (to me) the voices of Ponselle and Rethberg from an earlier generation or (say) Schwarzkopf and Seefried from the post-war years. Even so, at the end of this greatly admired anthology of Steber's singing I cannot quite summon up moments where the heart has suddenly been touched – except by sheer technical perfection. Perhaps in ''The last rose of summer'' (Martha), the second verse of Danny Boy, and the cries of ''Azael'' in Debussy's L'enfant prodigue: but, as I say, something of that initial notion persists.
The ''Air de Lia'' (L'enfant prodigue) is certainly one of the gems here. Made in 1938, before her Metropolitan Auditions of the Air award, this is a private recording with piano, and it shows a most lovely young voice, pure and firm and forfeiting nothing in quality as it increases in volume and intensity. There is an authority there too, with not the faintest hint of the student or even the debutante about it. Her Ernani aria, from the triumphant finals in 1940, is distinguished in the first place by the accuracy of the high A and the rarely observed staccatos in descent. The 'coloratura' arias (''Una voce'' and ''Je suis Titania'') illustrate the proficiency of the all-rounder, but also some want of playfulness and charm. The excerpts from La traviata are, again, marvellous in assurance and accomplishment, and probably, even if there were more that Steber would have liked to do, the remorseless literalness of Pelletier's conducting could scarcely have encouraged it.
However, all such reservations are incidental. Steber is a great renewer of standards; hearing her in these records from her twenties and thirties, we recognize afresh how a well-trained singer should sound. It is good, too, to hear her colleagues, Tokatyan and Cehanovsky, both on good form. The recorded sound is clear, Richard Conrad's notes have a vivid, first-hand interest, and from his collection comes a lovely photography of Steber as she was just about the time when the first of these recordings was made.'