With this (there is another volume to follow) and her recent Puccini recital (Orfeo, 5/95), it seems to me that the best recordings of the decade in this repertoire of the Italian lyric-dramatic soprano are those of Julia Varady. Her voice is not particularly powerful, and she has always been somehow outside the mainstream of operatic life as reflected by the large record companies; but neither of those should be a very potent factor in her evaluation. What she does is to endow these arias we have heard hundreds of times, and of which we all have our favourite memories and recordings, with renewed life through an art which is fully responsive, highly fastidious, lovely in the quality of its sound and individual in its timbre and inflexion.
The beauty of tone is evident first of all in its well-preserved purity (and Varady, born in 1941, is of an age when normally allowances have to be made). Here is not a full-bodied, rich Ponselle-like voice (if one had to look for comparisons perhaps Meta Seinemeyer would come to mind), but she makes wonderfully effective use of her resources, which include a surprisingly strong lower register and an upward range that (as we hear) easily encompasses the high D flat and has an E flat available. She is dramatic in style yet also thoroughly accomplished in her scales, trills and other fioriture. Her first Trovatore aria, for instance, includes the cabaletta with its full complement of technical brilliances. The musical instinct seems almost infallible – a ‘wrong’ portamento or rubato always irritates and here everything seems right. A remarkable sensitivity is at work throughout.
The orchestra, we note, is conducted by Fischer-Dieskau, Varady’s husband, and here too is a fine example of a positive, non-routine collaboration, the pacing and shading of the orchestral parts so frequently having something specific to offer (for example, in the letter passage from La traviata). The recording is well-balanced, presentation very adequate, and one can only replay and look forward to Vol. 2.
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