EMI Classics “Great Recordings of the Century” 09679 2, 77:24 ****:
Soprano Lucia Popp (1939-1993) was to her voice range what Fritz Wunderlich had been to the tenor repertory, a distinctively light, flexible, and eminently youthful force in lyric repertory. While Popp began as a light, high coloratura, her voice deepened in timbre as she matured, and she added roles–say, in Der Rosenkavalier, Orff, Wagner, and Handel–which added emotional poignancy and spiritual depth to the sheer, rounded luster of her natural tone. The Mozart opera arias are of a piece: mostly written by Da Ponte, they each combine hopes for requited love and spiritual fidelity.
These Mozart performances date from 1967 and 1983, respectively, and they float in that special aether that defines the Mozart vocal style. Opening with her vocal airlift over a violin obbligato in Il re pastore, Popp sings of ardor and devotion. Cherubino’s amazing aria from Le Nozze di Figaro celebrates the mysteries of love without having quite mastered them. Popp’s slight emotive flutter at “Sospiro e gemo senza voler, palpito e tremo senza saper” speaks volumes for her characterization. The Contessa’s aria, “Porgi, amor,” with its intimations of love and death, passes before us all too quickly. To have heard Popp’s Konstanze against Wunderlich’s Belmonte in The Abduction from the Seraglio must be a performance given in Heaven: here, Popp intones “Weicher Kummer herrscht in meiner Seele” with restrained despair, the flutes and oboe wafting nature’s commiseration and consolation at once. The breathed phrases, the rounded cadences, the lightly applied melismas, bespeak a fluency of vocal delivery to make us weep. Ilia’s recitative and aria from Idomeneo maintains the same conceit: that Nature acts as a confidante for the passionate lover, the zephyrs’ carrying love’s adoration. With Zerlina’s “In quali eccessi” from Don Giovanni, we encounter the spinto qualities Popp could convey in accompanied recitative, the flexible steel in her mid-range that could float a trill, her subtle chest tone. Her voice plays legato like a silken keyboard in the cantilena, “Mi tradi quell’alma ingrata,” each phrase sliding into the next, seamless. While some pedants complained of “hairpin legato” in Popp’s technique, I find the soft swelling of the tone captivating. The tessitura, with its leaps and high notes (also in Donna Anna‘s “Crudele?” aria), already suggest the stratosphere of the motet Exsultate jubilate on the disc.
The two Laudate Dominum inscriptions derive from two distinct sacred works (rec. 1967), the Solemn Vespers, K. 339 and the Vesperae de domenica, K. 321. John McCarthy’s Ambrosian Singers join Popp for these devotional moments, the first taken at as an adagio as ethereal as the slow movement of the Piano Concerto, K. 467. Can anyone intone “For His merciful kindness” with more sympathy? Leslie Pearson provides the organ accompaniment for the more rhythmically alert K. 321. Our last excursion into Mozart’s flights of musical inspiration comes with the K. 165, whose final movement, “Alleluia,” must suffice for the vocal gymnastics the Queen of the Night would have supplied us had she been present on this miraculous album.
— Gary Lemco