Time rushes on downhill; can it really be 20 years ago that Valerie Masterson enchanted English National Opera audiences as Massenet’s Manon? Her career then had already taken her to Paris, where she sang Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust, one of her parts at Covent Garden too. I don’t think she ever sang Elisabeth de Valois on stage, and though she would have made an enchanting Nina in Cherubin and Fanny in Sapho, those two are also just for the record.
Looking at the small print in the booklet accompanying this CD, one sees that the recording sessions stretch over several years, they’re a labour of love as a homage to Masterson’s successes in French opera, and although the voice here and there has more of that delicious trembling that Louise sings about in ‘Depuis le jour’, in general this is a tribute to someone who never allowed herself to stray outside the repertory to which she was suited. Just in the Mirror aria from Thais does the beat in the voice become intrusive – this was an opera that ENO once planned to revive for her, but some budget cut or other led to its cancellation.
The voice still has that individual plaintive quality that was so affecting in Manon, the brief extract from the Saint Sulpice scene is marginally more successful than the Act 1 ‘Je suis encore’. The aria from Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride carries her into a more dramatic range than she used on stage, but her experience in Handel too is useful here. The Don Carlos aria in its original French is effective, though one misses the chorus. My favourite of all is her coquettish ‘Vive amour qui reve’ from Cherubin, this one the aria for the other heroine, the glamorous Ensoleillad. A touching essay in nostalgia.PO’C