This is the final volume
of Naxos’s Melba series. At its heart
is the famous series of discs recorded
at her Covent Garden Farewell performance
in June 1926, a brilliant example of
the imperious preservation of her voice.
It also includes her farewell speech
from the stage.
But we start earlier.
She was in variable voice when she made
the first of the commercial recordings
on the disc, in Hayes, in 1921. Nearing
sixty the material she was encouraged
to essay was light in the extreme and
tinged with the nostalgia of the pre-War
years. Only the first matrix, the Chant
hindoue, has any staying power as a
piece and she began the session with
that habitual coolness, with perfectly
filed intonation, and the corollary
of considerable security which lent
part of her recorded repertoire so glacial
an air. Of the six songs only half were
issued at the time on 78 and we can
guess that some awkward runs in Landon
Ronald’s Away on the hills there
runs a stream precluded release.
Hearing the regal Melba in By the
Waters of Minnetonka makes for,
how shall we put this, entertainingly
doubtful listening.
But the core is the
Farewell performance, and here she sings
Verdi and Puccini with, inter alia,
two of her compatriots and protégées
Browning Mummery and John Brownlee.
One side, Donde lieta uscì
from La Bohème was actually released
at the time, on HMV DB 943 but the remainder
had to wait for LP issues in, I think,
the mid-1970s. Given the nature of the
recording, the slightly, inevitably,
recessed stage perspective and the exigencies
of the set-up the live performance emerges
with laudable clarity and immediacy.
It’s unfortunate that the Amen of her
Otello Ave Maria cuts abruptly
at the end of the side, because she
manages to cast a palpable spell over
the auditorium – the voice still in
remarkable estate, vowels characteristically
very open, consonants sharp, vibrato
not, even at this stage in her career,
widening to any appreciable degree.
Browning Mummery impresses most of the
other supporting singers, his tenor
full of clarity and heft. We get Melba’s
Speech, as well as the much less well-known
speech of Lord Stanley of Alderley (local
colour, worth hearing the once). And
then to her very last sides, made a
few months later in the Small Queen’s
Hall in London when she was joined by
Brownlee and by pianist Harold Craxton.
The sound is good, forward, in the Verdi
but Brownlee sounds a mite buttoned
up; surprisingly in the Bemberg, the
immediately succeeding matrix, the sound
is much less immediate. It is appropriate
that she ended with Bemberg, erstwhile
lover, factotum and camp follower, and
with the Burleigh-arranged Swing
low, sweet chariot – it shows the
variousness of Melba. Her importance
is not lessened by the relative triviality
of the repertoire she essays here. Fine
transfers.
Jonathan Woolf