Mozart: Batti, batti, o bel Masetto (from Don Giovanni)

Mojca Erdmann’s Deutsche Grammophon recording debut combines a variety of Mozart’s best beloved arias and works by his contemporaries such as J.C. Bach, Holzbauer, and Paisiello. The album also features Andrea Marcon and the outstanding period instrumentalists of La Cetra Baroque Orchestra, Basle. Plans in 2011 include her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera as Zerlina in a new Don Giovanni.

Although she was born near Paris in 1876, her career had closer ties to Germany than to France. Her debut was in Wiesbaden as Mignon in 1902 and she moved to Berlin in 1905. She sang many roles at the Staatsoper including Carmen, Violetta and Mignon and retired from the stage in 1927. She later made guest appearances in Holland, Scandinavia and several German opera houses.

Selma Kurz (1874-1933) ranks amongst the leading coloratura-voices of this century. The stupendous brilliance and the incredible ease with which she mastered the most difficult and breakneck coloratura-passages were and are truly impressive. Recordings made by the Gramophone label 1911-13

“One of the most delicate, sighing, judiciously used women’s voices one might ever hear.” That was the verdict of the tenor Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, writing in his fascinating study of the leading singers of his time, Voci parallele (Bologna ed. 1977). “Licia Albanese,” he says, “would move on stage purposefully, with precision, painting her tones with careful control of her means and a clear perception of their end”. Audiences were captivated by an effect of modesty, simplicity and tenderness but behind that effect was a solid mastery of her art. He, the senior artist, is full of admiration. But he has a warning: we should not suppose that these fixed, fossilised, mummified objects we call records can convey the individuality, the true character of such singers. So: caveat emptor. Lauri-Volpi had his own way of putting things (that adjective ‘sighing’ surprises us, not so much in itself as in its placing, second among the primary characteristics of the singer he is describing, and one may well object that records, however ‘fixed’, can at least sing to us, which is more than fossils and mummies can do). There is still something in what he says. He is thinking of Albanese’s particular kind of art: that delicate, ‘sighing’ quality which he hears inwardly, summoned up in a memory that is visual as well as aural and which is scarcely to be ‘fixed’, held still. Its essence lies in the moving, breathing individual. He speaks of her strong intuitive faculties. She knew what she was going to do next, vocally and dramatically – but what the audience experienced was the sense of an assured spontaneity. In the theatre you felt that her singing and her movements might take any number of forms: in a recording it will always take one. The living being is caught, pinned-down, captured; and that’s not the way she was.

Extract from the booklet note John Steane, 2008