Records
Method Singing
By DAVID CAIRNS Personally I am prepared to forgive Madame Callas everything, even the witless pomposity of her television pronouncements about her Art. I will sit stoically through the worst torments she can inflict in the first act of La Traviata any night of the week, when I know that only to hear her 'Attendo, attendo' in the last act is to experience opera on a level of intensity at which music and drama are fused into a single sub- stance. But the old-timers do not exaggerate the purely vocal perfections of their darlings. The records are there to prove it. Olympus, the latest company to reproduce some of them on LP, has brought out three seven-inch discs de- voted to Maurel (the original lago and Falstaff), Litvinne and Denim. Of these the Maurel, is the best ins quality of recording, historical interest and artistic vigour. Like many of its kind, it was made when the singer had reached a time of life at which today only the modern microphone would save his successors from whispering oblivion. But this helps to prove my taxi-driver's point. The voices of the finest singers of the Golden Age could still sound true as a bell at seventy because they had a method and they kept to it. The aeroplane was not waiting to take them somewhere else. There was time to spend a morning on a single phrase, a year learning a new role and several months of it ab- sorbing the words before even looking at the music.
Maurel's voice was not reckoned to have lasted so well as some. Yet here we have him at the age of sixty singing 'Quand'ero paggio' before a vociferous studio audience (twice in Italian and once in French), with an evenness of line, an intensity of mood and a superb relish and variety of declamation that would be rare today at any age.
Pinza at his best was an artist of comparable stature and panache, but he did not last so well. Two seven-inch records (Philips) give some idea of the nobility and versatility of the great Italian bass of whom Bruno Walter has said that no singer in his experience could approach him for inventiveness and unfailing sense of style. These records were made in his early fifties, before South Pacific had devoured the remains of his tremendous voice, and there are good things among them, notably Boris Godounov's first aria (sung in Italian) and 'Si la rigueur' from Halevy's La Juive. But what a falling-off, in richness, con- centration and resonance, from the Pinza of twenty years earlier, when he and Ponselle made that memorable record of `La Vergine degli angeli' from La Forza del Destino.
This splendid scene is included in The Art of Rosa Ponselle, two twelve-inch discs issued by Camden at only 26s. 2-14. each. Listening to these records one feels that Geraldine Farrar did not go half far enough when she said that in any discussion of great singers there were two to be considered before all others—Caruso and Pon- selle. With a style of the utmost grandeur (demonstrated here in arias from Norma and La Vestale), a vocal timbre of incredible fire and purity, seemingly endless reserves of power and, with all, that quality of essential femininity which has gradually disappeared since women were emancipated, there was something unique about Ponselle, a sense of primeval life-force. Even her superb agility seemed the' inevitable expression of a natural force and not the product of craft at all. But she was remarkable as an artist as well. Perhaps Callas has greater ability to infuse appar- ently unimportant stretches of recitative with beauty and meaning. But nothing in these records is more moving than Ponselle's performance in the third act duet from Aida, with Martinelli's Rha- dames. The pathetic irony of this scene is caught with a subtle mastery that Callas herself would not disdain, while the sheer singing is of a flawlessness beyond the reach of any soprano now before the public. Ponselle retired from the stage when she was still young, but by all accounts her Powers, at sixty-two, are little impaired. Not many operatic recordings of her exist; and to fill out the fourth side Camden have had to include a certain amount of Edwardian rubbish : none the less this is a set which must not be missed.
In the light of Ponselle, Brouwenstijn sounds very much a child of her time. A Philips EP, with arras from Don Carlos and La Forza, shows some of the familiar modern failings—poor con- trol of breathing, weak lower register, unsteady mezza voce. But there is something so appealing about her singing, in both charm of timbre and deep sincerity of manner, that in the end one prefers her to many a more efficient soprano. I would rather listen to Brouwenstijn than to Welitsch, six of whose arias (from Mozart, Puc- cini and Johann Strauss) now reappear on a ten-inch Philips disc. The splendour of Welitsch's voice did not long survive her thirties. She drove it too hard. At first its glittering clarity is thrill- ing (1 will never forget the impact, in a small theatre, of the first dozen notes of 'Or sai chi l'onore'—included here—when she sang in Don Giovanni at one of the early Edinburgh festivals). But before long the wonder wears off and monotony supervenes. For all their brilliance (and this record has caught them in time) her high notes lacked emotional intensity. The Best of Caruso, Vol. 2 (RCA), offers a cornucopia of riches, including a magnificent 'Questa o quella,' the big duet from La Forza with Scotti, and a hair-raising rendering of 'Over There,' made in 1918, which clearly turned the tide. The ven- geance duet from Otello, with Tito Ruffo, was recorded a few years earlier; a performance, whether or not because of the mutual antipathy of the two singers, of extraordinary force and ferocity. But Caruso never played Otello. The greatest of tenors was still studying the part when he died at the age of forty-eight. Today, he would have sung, it in every opera house from Sydney to Dar-es-Salaam.
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