Box Set Deep-Dive, Rob Cowan on Victoria de los Ángeles

Last year marked the birth centenary of the great Catalan Spanish lyric soprano Victoria de los Ángeles, but with Maria Callas - prized worldwide as 'La Divina' - born in the same year, and Callas being the icon she was, Warner Classics’s handsome 59-CD de los Ángeles collection was rather upstaged by their huge 131-CD Callas set.

And yet back in the 1950s and 60s, what was EMI (and is now Warner) had three major sopranos on their books: Callas the charismatic mega-star, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf the fastidious interpreter of mainly German repertoire (and of Lieder in particular), and Victoria de los Ángeles whose gorgeous singing graced numerous operas (some recorded twice), and a whole host of songs, from various arie antiche, through French mélodies (including two heart-warming volumes of Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne) to numerous songs from around the world. True, her occasional English isn’t too fluent (try two arias from Handel’s Judas Maccabeus under Sir Adrian Boult) although the actual singing is wonderful.

De los Ángeles was one of those all-too-rare artists who could infuse even the tiniest miniature (this wonderful set is packed full of them) with a wealth of tonal, expressive and dynamic variety. Take Respighi’s 'E se un giorno tornasse' ‘What if one day he should return?’, ie ‘what should I tell him? That I expected him right up until my own death’. This exquisite recitative with piano chords (all 2:49 of it, with pianist Ivor Newton) finds de los Ángeles imbuing each phrase with a wealth of colour and meaning, playing the microphone as she might play an audience in the recital hall. A similar sort of refined animation informs the voluminous song selections on these discs, especially those by Spanish composers.

Turning to opera, Puccini is a favourite repertory destination, including a legendary La bohème under Sir Thomas Beecham (who also conducts de los Ángeles and Nicolai Gedda in Bizet’s Carmen). Madama Butterfly is represented twice, both recordings in a class of their own: the earlier of the two from 1954 under Gianandrea Gavazzeni (with Giuseppe di Stefano as Pinkerton), the stereo version from five years later, under a less dynamic Gabriele Santini but where di Stefano is replaced by one of de los Ángeles’s favourite singing partners, Jüssi Bjoerling.

Turn to ‘Vogliateme bene, un bene piccolino’, the end of Act 1, on both versions (track 13 on discs 26 and 47, respectively), where Pinkerton and Butterfly sing a love duet and prepare to spend their first night together, and there’s an immediacy and lack of guile about the mono recording that its stereo successor doesn’t quite capture.

Other operas represented in memorable recordings include two versions of Gounod’s Faust (from 1953 and 1958, both with Nicolai Gedda as Faust and Boris Christoff as Méphistophélès, and both authoritatively conducted by André Cluytens), Manuel de Falla’s La vida breve, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, Massenet’s Manon and Werther, Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Suor Angelica, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, and Vivaldi’s Orlando furioso.

But for me the operatic highlight of the set is Debussy’s ‘love triangle opera’ Pelléas et Mélisande under Cluytens with Jacques Jansen as Pélléas (a role which he sang on the world premiere recording of the complete opera under Roger Désormière, also out on Warner Classics). De los Ángeles captures Mélisande’s vulnerable yet mysterious personality with total conviction, and Gérard Souzay is intensely moving as Prince Golaud.

The transfers are excellent, and so is the tough-boxed presentation, the detailed documentation and the valuable annotation. And although there are no texts, most are easy to access online. If Victoria de los Ángeles’s singing doesn’t melt your heart, no-one else’s will. And I can’t frame my strong recommendation in better terms than that.