Reviews of:
“Met Legends: Mirella Freni” Arias by Donizetti, Bellini, Puccini, Verdi, Gounod, et al.  Ferraris, Votto, other conductors.  Texts and translations. MET 239

“Met Legends: Régine Crespin” Arias and songs by Wagner, Berlioz, Rossini, Poulenc, Roussel et al.  Ackermann, Pretre, other conductors.  Texts and translations. MET 240
by Drew Minter.
Opera News; April 2001

Two new volumes in the “Met Legends” series highlight two beloved singers in special ways.  In both cases, the chosen selections come from an eight-year period surrounding the artists’ Metropolitan Opera debuts, both during the 1960’s, when they were in their early thirties.  Each album includes arias not considered central to the divas’ legacies: Freni’s Lucia and Amina, for instance, and Crespin’s Mathilde in an aria from Guillaume Tell.  And both legends of song are in radiant, ample voice.

It is nearly impossible to imagine Mirella Freni ever being booed.  But Paul Gruber’s marvelous notes describe the nasty opening of her La Traviata in 1964 in the Karajan/Zeffirelli production which provoked such a din nearly causing the young singer to abandon her career.  The Traviata aria (“Ah, fors’e lui”), recorded just two years later, is delivered with force, limpid pianissimos, and surprising coloratura skill, but it lacks the high E-flat (not required by Verdi) to which audiences have become accustomed.  This missing note, while surprising to our ears today, hardly seems cause for cavil.  The super-high notes of the coloratura soprano were never part of Freni’s arsenal.  Though she continued to sing some of the soubrette coloratura repertoire (with the exception of Gounod’s Faust and Bellini’s Sonnambula, these famous roles, such as her charming Susanna or Zerlina, are not represented on this album), the soprano moved solidly into the lirico-spinto category and stayed put.

One can see why.  Her voice is utterly secure in any dynamic up to the high C.   And the way she colors words!  When she, as Louise, says that she is “trop heureuse” (on a high B!), one feels the desperation and need of that happiness.  When she, as Suor Angelica, realizes that her baby was “moro senza sapere quanto t’amava,” one hears the darkness of that realization.  Her other maternal ecerpt here, as Madama Butterfuly, brings out tender colors.  But aside from these perfect verismo impersonations, the album highlights Freni’s consummate skill as an ensemble musician in excerpted duets with Nicolai Gedda and Luciano Pavorotti.  The joy one feels in her solo singing seems all the more heightened in her own joy in making music with others.

The Régine Crespin album, like that diva’s career, is more divers in its repertoire.  It happily includes four Wagner excerpts, but it also comprehends the subtleties of Roussel, the cantilena of Rossini, and the near spoken lines of Poulenc.  Her voice is big, big, big stuff.  Once in a while, a high note or two is unwieldy, but in the next moment, it changes to the most focused and disarming pianissimo ever heard.  While her German and Italian are fine, the French excerpts are at the heart of this album, and never has singing in French seemed more interesting.   When she describes Faust’s attributes in Berlioz’s “D’amour l’ardente flame,” his charming eyes and enchanting voice come alive in Crespin’s rendering of the text.  The description of the countryside of the soul in Faure’s “Clair de lune” seems like a vista of Crespin’s, and French music’s, soul.

It is wonderful that almost a third of the Crespin excerpts are songs, because the art song brings out a vulnerable side of Crespin only touched upon in the opera arias.  In Jerome Hines’s 1982 book Great Singers on Great Singing, Crespin described her own vocal struggle: “I sing too wide. All of us sing too loud and too wide.  If you have a big voice, you want to give even more.”  When she is singing songs with a piano, Crespin allows herself interior moments of incredible appeal, and she seems to be able to bring these across fully in a studio recording.   Recordings of her live in opera show a greater range and immediacy than these studio recordings, however.  (The two-disc set “Régine Crespin sur Scene”—Rodolphe RPC 32445.46—shows both greater fire and more tendresse.)

A number of typographical errors aside, the booklets accompanying these discs offer fine reverential profiles.  (The Crespin one is by David Hamilton.)  In the end, these two legends of the Met are proved by these recordings to have been communicators of the highest level.