Giuseppe Verdi

The great American mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne celebrated her her 70th birthday in January 2004 and that year also marked 50 years since her professional debut.

Horne’s debut in 1954 was in in Los Angeles. That same year her name and voice was brought to many more people than could ever hear her in the opera house through the 1954 film Carmen Jones in which she sang the dubbed voice of Dorothy Dandridge. Her Covent Garden debut was as Marie in Wozzeck (sung in English at that time) in 1964 – she had made her San Francisco debut in 1960 with the same role. It was with Joan Sutherland that Marilyn Horne found the perfect vocal partner and their performances in the great bel canto operas by Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti took the opera world by storm in the 1960s and early 1970s.

By the time she retired in 1998, Marilyn Horne’s long and distinguished career embraced an enormous variety of operatic roles, as well as a wide variety of solo song ranging from Schubert, Schumann and Mahler through to modern American songs. Such a wide repertory was due to the sheer range of her voice and its remarkable flexibility, a voice that could sustain long lines of melody as well as negotiate the most florid vocal pyrotechnics.

Marilyn Horne participated in a number of complete opera recordings (among them classic recordings of Norma and Semiramide with Joan Sutherland) for Decca and also made ten recital programmes.

The complete recitals are now reissued in their entirety as a Collector Edition on 11 CDs and preserve the original sequence of music as presented on vinyl; the original LP cover art is reproduced for the CD sleeves.

Over a long and still flourishing career Sir Thomas Allen has given benchmark performances in several operatic roles of which Mozart and Verdi operas figure strongly. With two spicy exceptions, every item in this programme comes from an opera by Mozart or Verdi. Part of the design of this recital series is to highlight the particular type of voice and explore its repertoire. The works chosen for this disc provide a unique showcase of Sir Thomas Allen’s unique gifts and that of the baritone in general. The Sunday Telegraph wrote of volume one, “How good to have this anthology of Thomas Allen’s versatility in a

wide range of his operatic roles… anyone who cherishes good singing will rejoice in this great baritone’s smooth legato, perfect diction, subtle characterisation and, of course, beautiful and unmistakable voice,” and The Guardian noted “As always, Allen was a supremely intelligent recitalist, matching sound with sense, probing the meaning of a text without fracturing the vocal line.”

As in previous issues, the solos are interspersed with longer excerpts, duets and ensembles, including performances with Susan Gritton and Claire Rutter. With Ford’s monologue in Falstaff, Sir Thomas extends his lyrical voice to encompass the more theatrical style of late Verdi and in the lighter Weill ‘September Song’, he extends it further, albeit in a different direction altogether. Other repertoire includes recitatives and arias from Verdi’s Macbeth and La Traviata, arias from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, and duets from The Magic Flute.

All tracks sung in English

During his short career during the 1950s, Maltese tenor Paul Asciak (now in his mid-80s) was noted by critics and the public, both here and in Italy, for possessing a voice of heroic tone; best described as a strong lirico spinto which verged towards a tenor drammatico towards the end of his career. His singing throughout a decade of activity (he retired from public performance in 1961) was elegant, well-phrased, focused and produced with assurance of pitch and tone.

Arturo Toscanini was the second cellist in the orchestra of La Scala, Milan, for the triumphant first performance of Verdi’s Otello on 5th February 1887. Sixty years later he led a radio broadcast of Otello spread over two evenings that is considered by many to be the most successful of his opera recordings for NBC. Described by one of Toscanini’s biographers, Joseph Horowitz, as ‘the one that comes closest to recapturing Toscanini’s revolutionary impact in the pit’, this December 1947 recording is remarkable for Toscanini’s dramatic grasp of Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy, and his scrupulous observation of Verdi’s most detailed dynamic markings.