Verdi: Ave Maria (from Otello)

Audiences and critics hail the Finnish soprano Soile Isokoski as one of the finest singers in the world. Her more recent orchestral albums on Ondine have been praised as top-choice recordings and earned the highest distinctions such as the BBC Music Magazine Disc of the Year 2007 Award, a 2007 MIDEM Classical Award and a 2002 Gramophone Award.

This disc features popular scenes and arias from the late-19th century Italian, French and Russian opera marking Soile Isokoski's greatest successes on stage. Included are the famous aria "Sì. Mi chiamano Mimì" from La Bohème, with which Soile Isokoski gave her opera début in 1989, as well as the famous ‘Letter scene’ from Eugene Onegin, which she sang at the Finnish National Opera, in 2006, to international acclaim. Besides her role debuts as Tatyana, Ellen Orford in Dresden, Christine in Intermezzo at the Theater an der Wien (2008) and Charpentier's Louise at the Bastille Opera in Paris, Ms. Isokoski's engagements until 2009 include Cosí fan tutte in Bilbao and Vienna, Lohengrin in Geneva, La Juive, Intermezzo, Rosenkavalier and Faust in Vienna and Don Giovanni at the MET.

The celebrated soprano Susan Chilcott died five years ago after becoming one of the mainstays of La Monnaie. She made her debut there in 1994 under most extraordinary circumstances when she agreed to replace at very short notice an ailing colleague in the demanding role of Peter Grimes’ Ellen. Susan Chilcott appeared in the world’s major opera houses: the Met, Covent Garden, Garnier, Bastille, the Amsterdam Opera. At La Monnaie she took part in many productions under Antonio Pappano’s baton. Highlights of these productions are featured on this CD. This release is a tribute to a singer whose sad and early death robbed the operatic stage of a unique and extraordinary talent.

“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