Art song collection
Elise Curran | Orlando, FL United States | 04/04/2007
(3 out of 5 stars)
"I almost didn't buy this recording, based on the negative reviews here, but I'm glad I did, as there were many pieces that I had never heard, but wanted to, and I also was interested to have Sutherland's version of the Rossini Serate Musicali, as June Anderson is the only other one I have.
Joan does a great job with "La pastorella delle alpi", "L'Orgia", 'La gita in gondola', and particularly "La Danza", which I was so glad to hear her do! I do have to be fair and say I think that occasionally some of the tempos are too slow. "La promessa" in particular, which has been a daily warm up song for me for years, was not pleasing to me, and I also just don't understand why the "chanson de Zora" is so slow....I don't think the song works that way.
But for people to say that the pieces are not sung well or expressively, or that Bonynge does not accompany well is just not true. Many of the song choices were not best suited to show Joan's particular talents, but if you keep in mind that this is an art song collection, that you know what you're getting. Amazon does list all the songs, so it's not like you're buying something without knowing ahead of time what's on it. It is also true that this is a late recording, when she was 52, and the voice is darker than it used to be. Sometimes the pieces suffer from this, but many do not, and she always sings musically. I should also mention that the fact that the recording was done with apparently only one microphone to pick up both voice and piano serves neither as well as could be hoped.
Some other pieces I enjoyed were 'Mezzanotte', 'Mariquita', "Pastorale', 'Le papillon et la fleur', 'Les filles de Cadix', 'J'attends toujours', and others. I think it's definitely worth owning."
Singing quite good, technical problems
Thomas B. Dawkins | Boston, MA | 06/24/2007
(4 out of 5 stars)
"I will admit freely that I'm a bit of a Sutherland freak, and I can find some kind of value in just about anything she ever did, right up to the last studio recording of Adriana Lecouvreur. There are some real gems of pieces here, some excellent singing too. The problems that I have are primarily not with Dame Joan's singing, but with the production, or with Bonynge's piano or tempi. (As he coached her on everything, I'm making the perhaps erroneous assumption that he chose the tempi for everything too).
"La promessa" is just... plain... slow. What caught me immediately other than the droopy tempo is that everything on these two discs is recorded "at home." Even if that's not true, it was certainly captured in a fairly small room that isn't particularly live acoustically speaking. While it might be very nice to actually go to an evening at home with Dame Joan, to record a voice of her size in a living room kind of environment is going to sound very close, not resonant at all, and this setting will emphasize the worst in any singer. You hear things like breaths, extra air in the sound (even where it's intentional) and other technical things that are usually inaudible in a hall or an opera house.
That said, the Bellini and Donizetti songs are still very charming. For some French repertoire recorded in a more forgiving hall, there are six mélodies released for the first time on The Art of Joan Sutherland that almost make buying the whole set worthwhile. I have noted something in the piano part of one of these tracks, the Gounod Sérénade, is that Richard Bonynge does not play the entire written accompaniment. I'm sure that he knew his wife's singing very well and obviously had a tremendous influence on her throughout her career. But he's not the best pianist out there, and it would be great to hear her with one of the song accompanists like Gerald Moore (who recorded over 600 Schubert songs alone with Fischer-Dieskau) or, were she recording today, Graham Johnson."
Track Listings (18) - Disc #1