Records
Divas' Gifts
By DAVID CAIRNS
THERE are people who cry `canary-fancying' at the men- tion of Sembrich or Bonin- segna, and sweep aside im- patiently the whole cult of the golden age and the blue label. But they should not. The canary-fanciers are only wrong when they exalt a means into an end. They are not wrong when they ask us to cherish beautiful singing and clear, firm voice production. It may be, as Shaw said in his old age, that except in the matter of trills, roulades and other vocal acro- batics we sing better than our grandfathers; probably if we could experience an average even- ing at Covent Garden or Drury Lane sixty years ago we would hear goat-bleaters, ear-borers and leviathan-wobblers compared with whom our What-d'ye-call-him, Thing'em-bob and likewise Never-mind would seem manageable demons— not, to mention a general stage deportment in company with which `no exclusively disposed Thames mudlark would be seen grubbing for pen- nies.' But it is the cream of the generations, the renowned Aidas and Walthers and Aminas, that count, and in any comparison the clear superior- ity of fifty years or even twenty-five years ago is a fact. Now that so many of the pre-war 78s and old collector's items are coming out on LPs, there is no further excuse for disputing it.
Take the anthology of Eleven Famous Singers, in HMV's series 'Great Recordings of the Cen- tury.' It is not only that even in his mid-fifties Martinelli, singing `Dio mi potevi' and 'Niun mi tema' in 1939, could in firmness of tone and heroic grandeur of style leave any modern Otello stand- ing, as Mr. Victor Hochhauser would say; nor that Schumann-Heink, in part of Waltraute's Narration, recorded when she was sixty-eight, could make sounds of a truly Wagnerian rock- like steadiness and power that are simply not heard in Wagner today; nor, most strange of all, that Lucrezia Bori, at forty-nine, could produce, apparently without effort, the flawless, dazzling, perfectly even and exquisitely youthful singing that she does here in an aria from Puccini's operetta La Rondine. There were also famous singers in the Golden Age, like Scotti, who lost their voices early. But in the upper reaches of the profession, before the aeroplane destroyed it, a painstaking devotion to technical mastery was taken for granted. On this record only Pinza and Laurence Tibbett, neither of whom is represented by his best, reveal chinks in their mastery. Tito Schipa, in an aria from Luisa Miller, is elegant and tasteful but to me unexciting. But Toti dal Monte, marvellously graceful and glittering in Lucia's 'Regnava nel silenzio,' the incomparable Bori, Schumann-Heink, the superb Verdian sweep and style of Elizabeth Rethberg in Emilia's aria from the second act of A Masked Ball, and Rose Bampton, a fine soprano of the old school (though she was born as late as 1909) in the first act duet from Boccanegra with Tibbett—these make a record of rare beauty and interest.
So too is a Parlophone disc of eight arias re- corded by Lotte Lehmann between 1927 (when she was already forty-two) and 1933. Lehmann is a singer of whom it is difficult to speak with moderation. Her wonderful intensity and exal- tation, the sense of emotion always pressed down and running over, the peculiar catch in her voice like a transfigured whine, and the subtlety of colouring and verbal inflexion which reproduces the art of lieder singing on the scale of opera, combine to make her unique. She has technical faults by the most exacting standards—a tendency to sing slightly sharp, a certain harshness in the lowest register (noticeable here in the Fidelio aria), and occasionally a slight awkwardness when negotiating wide intervals in a fast tempo (see Agathe's first aria in Der Freischiitz). But what singer has used words with such vividness and subtlety? What singer has pierced the primary emotions of love and joy and pity and irrevocable loss so surely, so keenly? In Leonore's `Komm, Hoffnung' she blends passionate yearning, im- mense sadness and holy resolution with an over- whelming intensity. In Charlotte's letter scene from Massenet's Werther she draws the most extraordinary poignancy from the words 'Die Briefe, die Briefe.' Best on this record, to my mind, are the Fidelio, Werther and Freischiitz scenes and Mistress Ford's aria from The Merry Wives of Windsor, but all are memorable, even the empurpled number from Korngold's Das Wunder der Heliane.
Another splendid record is The Art of Oda Slobodskaya (Decca), a recital of Russian songs. They have all been recorded since the war, in the singer's fifties and sixties. But once again the tone is firm, the delivery easy and unfaltering. The songs include folk tunes from Rimsky's collection, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Stravin- sky and Soviet army songs. Some of them arc en- riched—the word is a pale approximation—by Madame Slobodskaya's commentary. Simply to hear her declamation, at once fruity and fastidious, of such phrases as 'the sparrow, the cockroach, the mouse, the louse, the flea, the gnat, all fighting their way to the bath' or 'Here is a bear's paw for our dinner, woman—cook it!' is a liberal education.
Who is there today, among the younger singers? Well, there is Callas. Her fascinating re- cital of French arias (Columbia) contains a few of those notoriously dubious high notes, but the degree of technical accomplishment is formid- able and the musicality matchless—though not even Madame Callas can transform that bird- brained piece ',le suis Titania' (the only possible retort to which is 'No you're not'). There is a hint of a lack of power in Delilah's two arias, and more than a hint in Carmen's two first-act arias, that her future will be in mezzo-soprano roles. It is interesting to compare this record with Rita Gorr's similar recital (HMV). Rita Gorr's rather fulsome `J'ai perdu mon Euridice' lacks Callas's intense truthfulness and sense of formal shape in the aria (this is partly the fault of Cluy- tens, who drags the time and in general accom- panies much less sensitively than Georges Pretre on the Callas record). Rita Gorr commands a rather small variety of colour and inflexion. Her Werther letter scene sounds beautiful but is hardly the same piece as Lotte Lehmann's; her Liebestod misses Lehmann's (and Wagner's) hushed ecstasy. In such pieces she seems the vic- tim of the very sumptuousness of her voice. But in music that suits her, what a grand and satisfy- ing singer. Where simpler, more generalised heroic emotion is demanded she is superb—in Azucena, Santuzza, in Ortrud's outburst of hate, in her big striding style in Delilah's arias, and in `0 don fatale' from Don Carlos, where the phrases flow with magnificent fullness and strength.
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