AVAILABILITY
www.preiserrecords.at
Tourel admirers have
quite a wide choice at the moment. Fortunately
a relatively large slice of her discography
is currently available but this Preiser
screws the focus tightly to 1945-47
and her Offenbach and Carmen, which
derive from sessions made for LP in
1952. In her middle years – from say
1942-46 (she was born in 1900) - she
undertook progressively prestigious
engagements, singing Berlioz with Toscanini,
Debussy with Koussevitzky and Prokofiev
with Stokowski. It was around this time
that she gave a well received Town Hall
recital and made renewed assaults on
the Met where she was only an intermittent
guest. She sang a lot of Poulenc, formed
a notable partnership with Bernstein
and proved a fine teacher.
So these recordings
come from the period of her vocal maturity.
The Rossini shows her rather girlish
timbre, despite her mezzo extension,
and the razor sharp divisions and not
least in L’Italiana in Algeri
a very subtly inflected portamenti style.
Lest one thinks of her at this time
as lacking in heft she proves in La
Cenerentola to have quite a taste
for the florid – with its corollary
of a floated lightness of production
and a wonderfully equalized scale. It’s
certainly not incendiary but then Tourel
wasn’t that kind of inflammatory artist.
There’s a lot of colour
and expression in her Offenbach – just
a hint of too much maybe in O mon
cher amant, je te jure – but her
cosmopolitan theatre style is just right
in the main for Offenbach – highly witty
and effective. Similarly her infectious,
mocking laugh in Pres des ramparts
shows how coquettish her Carmen could
be.
The transfers are blemish
free – unproblematic as to surface noise
and speed. Notes are biographical as
is generally the case with Preiser though
they do go into the famous business
concerning her obscure beginnings, about
which some may still be unaware.
Jonathan Woolf
Jennie Tourel (soprano) 
