Mussorgsky: Mephistopheles' Song of the Flea

Gottlieb Frick became a member of the Bayreuth Opera Chorus in 1930 and launched his solo career in 1934. He later became one of the most important German basses and certainly contradicted an old saying among conductors, that a fine choral singer will never become a fine soloist.

Carlo Morelli made his debut at Alessandria’s Teatro Municipale as Tonio in “Pagliacci” in 1922. In order to avoid having his name confused with that of his brother, the tenor/baritone Renato Zanelli, he adopted “Carlo Morelli” as his stage name. He sang for La Scala, Chicago Civic Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Her later settled in Mexico and died in 1970.

In the search for suitable and evocative words to describe a particular vocal quality, usually, for the bass voice one would expect of course adjectives like deep, black, sonorous, cavernous, thundering, impressive or even noble. Rarely is the word beautiful used. However, in the case of Alexander Kipnis, it most certainly applies. Alexander Kipnis was born into a very poor family in Zhitomir, Ukraine on l February 1891. They were very proud of the extraordinary quality of his singing voice, which attracted the attention of a visiting cantor from Bessarabia, who heard him as a soloist in the local synagogue choir. So taken was he by the boy’s natural talent, that, with a promise of some payment, the cantor persuaded Alexander’s mother to let him leave home and become a chorister at his synagogue. Alexander was befriended by one of the older singers with whom he lodged and who taught him the rudiments of music and also some Lieder. Kipnis then won a scholarship to enter the Warsaw Conservatoire, initially to study conducting, but of course he continued to sing, his voice having broken and become a bass. He decided to move to Berlin, undertaking further vocal studies with the well-known teacher Ernst Grenzebach.

This compilation is a tribute to one of the greatest bass voices ever to have recorded.