This disc from Alto showcases the talents of Joan Sutherland
captured around the time of her big breakthrough at Covent Garden
singing the role of Lucia di Lammermoor. Shortly after
this event she recorded her first recital disc with orchestra,
going into the studio with Nello Santi and singing arias from
Lucia along with Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix,
Verdi’s Ernani and I Vespri Siciliani. If this
selection does not seem quite typical of a Sutherland recital,
we must bear in mind that after the spectacular success in Lucia
di Lammermoor with Tullio Serafin conducting, Serafin was
keen for her to follow this up with Lady Macbeth. One of the
startling things about Sutherland’s early Lucia was not the
technical brilliance, but the sheer size of the voice and she
could, perhaps, have developed into a striking spinto
soprano, but she didn’t. This is apparent from her next recording,
The Art of the Prima Donna, made with Francesco Molinari-Pradelli
and the Royal Opera House Orchestra; here Sutherland assembled
a dazzling series of hommages to great prima donnas
of the past, and demonstrated her consummate ease with the coloratura
repertoire. This disc demonstrates something else which would
run through Sutherland’s career, a sense of approaching Verdi
from the past, performing Gilda and other roles firmly set in
the style of the singers of his day without exploring the way
Verdi was pushing vocalism onwards.
Alto have been issuing discs of excerpts from The Art of
the Prima Donna and now they have taken a group of arias
from this disc, and mixed them with a selection from the 1959
Nello Santi recital (omitting the Ernani aria) to give
a picture of Sutherland in her early prime. Listening to the
items on this disc, it is hardly possible not to be astonished
by the great beauty and technical facility of Sutherland’s voice.
However, in a 1981 Gramophone review of the Nello Santi recital
John Steane points out that what the recording doesn’t give
you is a sense of the amplitude of Sutherland’s voice, how it
filled the house; this is something we must bear in mind when
listening to the glorious coloratura on the disc. Sutherland
didn’t just have the ability to sing notes fast or high, her
upper register was evenly linked to the rest of her voice. Her
vocal production was even and smooth from bottom to very top;
on this disc the acuti are simply part of the voice, as beautiful
as the rest.
Listening to her diction here, you might consider that this
is a promising singer and but that a bit more work is required;
here history laughs at us as we realise that items on this disc
represented the peak of Sutherland’s achievement when it came
to diction and of making something of the words. A singing teacher
of mine used to opine that coloratura meant coloured,
that the singer should bear in mind the different colours of
the individual notes; this is something you get from Callas,
a sensitivity to the words and to how they colour the music,
the conveyance of detailed meaning in each phrase. On this disc
Sutherland approaches this ideal, but she would never consistently
do so again. As her technique matured, even if you forget the
mannerisms that crept in, it was obvious that text and meaning
were never of prime importance, instead it was line and phrase.
So the arias on this disc enable us to hear the young Sutherland
- young is a relative term, she was 33 when she made her Lucia
debut - and to appreciate the glory of the voice, combined with
a stunning technique.
The Willow Song from Otello and the aria from
I Vespri Siciliani are both items which are sung by sopranos
with more dramatic voices, spinto rather than lyric,
and they give hints of how Sutherland without Bonynge might
have developed, bringing out the spinto elements . Also,
being able to compare and contrast the different styles of aria,
we can see that Sutherland’s technique was very much wedded
to the Italian repertoire. Her performance of the mad scene
from Thomas’ Hamlet is quite brilliant in its way, but
if you listen to a French coloratura singer in the role, or
Sutherland’s great Australian predecessor Nellie Melba, you
can get a sense of the finer, narrower-focused vocalism that
this role requires. Interestingly, Melba is another singer whose
voice on disc can be deceptive in size, especially given the
limited recording techniques and the slender path of her vocal
emission. One commentator described her voice as akin to listening
to a silver trumpet.
If you are interested in Sutherland, this might not necessarily
be the disc for you. For one, neither the Santi nor the Molinari-Pradelli
recitals are represented complete; instead Alto spreads them
across discs. So this might be a disc which you would buy for
someone who has not heard the young Sutherland and who did not
possess the complete Art of the Prima Donna recital.
Perhaps, except that one or two of the transfers themselves
worried me; there seemed to be a degree of congestion, a hint
of distortion, in the upper registers on some tracks. Simply
said, if you are at all interested in the young Sutherland then
I would suggest looking out for the Art of the Prima Donna
in its 2-disc format; this is essential listening for anyone
interested in fine vocalism.
Robert Hugill
Joan Sutherland (soprano) 