This is a disc that barely needs any recommendation from a reviewer, especially at medium price. Three years after making her debut at the age of 20, Victoria de los Angeles attracted international attention by winning the Geneva competition (with, of all things, ''Abscheulicher'' from Fidelio): the BBC promptly engaged her for the Spanish repertoire—of which, just after the war, this country had no outstanding interpreters—and particularly to take the lead in a radio production of La vida breve. From this welcome reissue you may judge the effect on us all there of that wonderfully warm but pure lyrical voice, for her first EMI recordings were of Salud's two arias from that opera, under Stanford Robinson who had conducted that broadcast. It is safe to say that in this role she has been without equal: in fact, almost none have attempted to challenge her. In her sessions the following year her tonal beauty was displayed again in the Turina Saeta, and her crystal-clear brilliance in his Cantares; but she is perhaps most unforgettable of all in the melancholy reverie from Granados's Goyescas recorded a year later. (The strings' opening is made to sound rather harsh, and their later high passages a bit thin, but otherwise this item is notable for some lovely orchestral playing.)
About los Angeles's performance of Falla's seven folk-song settings there is less unanimous admiration. Affecting as she is in the sad ''Asturiana'' and the tender cradle-song, and sympathetically and pointedly as she is accompanied by Gerald Moore, she under-characterizes the more vigorous songs: as Desmond Shawe-Taylor remarked at the time, she presented these more successfully on the concert platform than on records. Here she is too refined, lacking the earthy quality (and the occasional irony) that are needed and her final ''Polo'', to anyone who ever heard the bitter savagery of Supervia's performance of it, is positively tame. That missing bite was fortunately recovered for her 1952 recording of Turina's colourful Canto a Sevilla, a mixed cycle of vocal and purely orchestral movements (the latter were recorded separately a year later): in the Saeta in the evocation of Holy Week she adopts a traditional penetrating timbre, and exhibits passionate colour as well as dulcet lyricism. Fistoulari and the LSO provide most able support, though the recording probably did less than justice to the violins' tone. Rather meanly, EMI provide neither texts nor translations.'