Formidable! A voice to hold children from play and old men from the chimney corner. Calbo’s manly aria in Maometto II probably suits it best. “Fear not!” it says (“Non temer!”), and the assurances which follow are uttered with such authority that every doubt is banished. Yet, as someone else has said, there is always some flaw, some stammer in the divine speech, and here it is a lisp. Martinelli used to give an imitation of a tenor who lisped the opening of his solo in Aida: “The [se] quel guerrier io fothi! The il mio thogno thi avverathe!” Here, I’m afraid, we have the mezzo-soprano counterpart. Her very first words in the recital are “Cruda sorte”, and it is particularly unfortunate that in the second solo an imperious rebuke to the grinning Taddeo (“Perche ridi, Taddeo?”) should follow the line “Io spero senza rischio e cortese”. But there is a certain splendour about it, lisp and all. The tone is so very ample, the range so broad, the volume so generous; and then the most rapid divisions are executed so skilfully, the runs performed so neatly. It is a voice of such roundness and depth that one imagines it must thin out or lose resonance at the top; but no, the repeated full-voiced high Bs are its crowning glory.
In some ways this great thick mattress or eiderdown of a voice is a liability – as recorded here, at any rate, it is not a voice for Rosina or Cinderella or even for the more playful aspect of Isabella, the Italian girl. Nor is the command which its owner has over her powers of expressive colouring as yet sufficient to make the changes from one character to another. The ‘men’ emerge best – Arsace, Tancredi, Malcolm and Calbo. There is clearly a line here back to Marilyn Horne, whose influence is often felt, especially as she goes down into the cellar for some of the fruitier low notes. The singer I used for comparisons was Della Jones, whose Rossini programme on Chandos contains several of the same arias. Her brighter, lighter voice brings refreshment, yet it also sets off very handsomely the enveloping warmth of Podles’s thicker timbre. In both discs one is thankful for the stylish orchestral playing, and as in their recording of Tancredi (Naxos, 11/95), the Hungarian Opera forces work with delightful neatness of touch for their conductor Pier Giorgio Morandi.'