Verdi: Tu che la vanità (from Don Carlo)

Angela Gheorghiu's highly-acclaimed Verdi Heroines album first appeared in 2000 and is now reinstated to the catalogue for the Verdi year.

Montserrat Caballé was one of the most stimulating and refined singers in opera, concert and recital in the second half of the 20th century. Born in Barcelona on 23 April 1933, she studied at the Barcelona Liceo and made her concert debut there in 1954. After opera engagements at Basle and Bremen and guest appearances in Milan, Vienna and Lisbon, she became a major international star in 1965 when she substituted for an ailing Marilyn Horne in a concert performance of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia in New York. Her long and highly successful career has encompassed a wide range of repertoire, including roles in a number of demanding bel canto operas in which she followed Maria Callas, who had brought these works back into public favour.

This CD, together with the 5-CD set The Sound of Montserrat Caballé, is being released to mark the diva’s 80th birthday.

The recital opens with the aria ‘Son vergin vezzosa’ sung by Elvira, the daughter of an English Puritan nobleman, to express happiness at her forthcoming marriage to the Cavalier Arturo in Bellini’s I puritani. But her joy gives way to madness when she wrongly believes Arturo has betrayed her, and her extended mad scene that begins ‘O rendetemi la speme’ is one of the high points in the bel canto repertoire. These two items give Caballé the opportunity to demonstrate her exquisitely beautiful voice and also to make use of her outstanding technical ability to sing florid music, as well as bring it to life dramatically when required. Next comes the closing scene from Bellini’s Il pirata, another long scene in which the heroine Imogene is deranged by grief as she watches the man she loves ascending the scaffold to be executed. This is another feast of bel canto singing at its most accomplished.

We then move to Verdi and his unfortunate heroine Aida, torn between her love for the dashing Egyptian soldier Radamès and her beloved homeland Ethiopia as she awaits him in a secret desert assignation: ‘Qui Radamès verrà...O patria mia’. Caballé then gives us a superb account of the poignant scene in Don Carlo where the queen Elisabetta recalls how happy she was in France when she was betrothed to Don Carlo, a Spanish prince, before she was forced for political reasons to marry Don Carlo’s elderly father, King Philip II of Spain

In the next aria, ‘Pace, Pace, mio Dio’ from La forza del destino, Caballé, tackles perhaps the most dramatic of the arias heard here. Leonora, a Spanish noblewoman, believing her lover to have deserted her after he accidentally killed her father, is living as a hermit in a cave in the mountains. She longs for the peace that death will one day bring her, but her solitude is interrupted by the abrupt arrival of a stranger at the entrance to her cave.

Verdi was a great admirer of Shakespeare and the programme ends with extracts from his settings of two of the bard’s plays. These are the eerie Sleepwalking Scene from Macbeth where Lady Macbeth is re-living in her dreams the horrendous murder of King Duncan that she carried out earlier in the play, and the poignant Willow Song and Ave Maria from the final scene of Otello where Caballé’s Desdemona is heartbreakingly moving.

This wonderfully constructed 2CD collection of opera arias highlights Callas’s spectacular climb to fame tracking her move from innocent young woman to the tragic heroine in her later years through the opera arias she recorded.

Featuring the most special and exquisitely interpreted arias of her output this collection brings together such opera favourites as O mio babbino caro, Vissi d’arte and Casta diva.

This is a recording of a complete concert performance dating from 1959.

These first releases of Margaret Price with the Münchner Rundfunkorchester cover a time period from 1977 to 1991. Her work was largely concentrated on Mozart and Verdi, to which this CD pays ample credit, and also features arias by Bellini, Cilea, Rossini and Weber. Mozartian clarity, a consistently effortless vocal production, histrionic fire and a healthy grounding – these attributes made Margaret Price an internationally revered opera star, especially by Munich audiences. Her relationship with the Bavarian State Opera was so close that Margaret Price settled in Munich for 18 years, not returning to her native Wales until the end of her career.

Previously unreleased live recordings from the “Sunday Concerts”.

Singer portrait featuring Margaret Price’s core repertoire, including famous arias from Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, Le nozze di Figaro, Aida, Otello and Norma.

Continuing the “Great Singers Live” series with the Münchner Rundfunkorchester under the direction of Heinz Wallberg, Leopold Hager and Thomas Fulton.

The Dutch soprano Gré Brouwenstijn has long been held in the highest esteem within her own country, and within a circle of vocal connoisseurs, for the fearless vibrancy of her approach to the great hochdramatisch soprano roles, without ever compromising the standards and ideals of vocal beauty: hers is a voice of great strength and flexibility, fully able to meet the challenge of projecting both the scale and drama of Wagner’s heroines while also inhabiting their more intimate confessions.

Brouwenstijn made precious few recordings – most of what is left to us now derives from private tapes or radio archives of live performances – but this compilation of two studio sessions (from 1954 and 1956) catches her in her vocal prime. The big numbers from Wagner’s early dramas (Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Der fliegende Holländer) are included, as well as Wagner’s own leaping-off points in Beethoven (‘Ah, perfido!’) and Weber (Der Freischütz). To finish, there’s a selection of mature Verdi, including ‘Tu che la vanità’ (Don Carlo) and ‘Pace, pace, mio Dio!’ (La forza del destino). This is an unmissable release for anyone in love with the art of the soprano voice.

Includes appreciation of Brouwenstijn by the writer and opera director Mike Ashman.