Lucia Popp’s voice always was described as “silvery”, which it was, although there’s often too much glare glinting off those silvery tones on this EMI “Very Best Of …” release. That’s due to the original engineering on the items from the early digital era and to the apparently casual assembly-line transfers, themselves made a while ago (the set has not been freshly remastered). With that caveat, this two-disc set offers a generous helping of the art of one of the most treasured singers of the late 1960s to the 1980s, during which time she added the necessary warmth and depth to her voice to move from soubrette and Queen of the Night-type roles to starring lyric ones. So while we do get “Der Holle Rache” as an example of the former from the 1972 Klemperer complete Magic Flute, we also get Pamina’s “Ach, ich fühl’s” from the Haitink Magic Flute made almost a decade later. There’s a nice helping of other Mozart here too, including a pristine excerpt from his Vespers K. 339 along with seven arias drawn from complete sets and from a 1983 recital disc routinely led by Leonard Slatkin, included to remind us of the horrors of early digital sound.
The centerpiece of the set is Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs with Klaus Tennstedt, among the better recorded versions. Popp is radiant here, singing with an inner glow that blends technical facility, sensitivity to the texts, and tonal purity, maintained even at Tennstedt’s slow tempos, which have a feeling of inevitability about them when done with such conviction. The Popp/Tennstedt partnership continues in the next track, the final movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, where the singer’s bell-like tones are ideal for projecting the child-like innocence of the texts.
Popp also shines in repertoire where you’d expect her to–Dvorák’s “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka and arias from two of Smetana’s operas, along with three selections from the Frühbeck de Burgos recording of Orff’s Carmina Burana. At times she uses intelligence to supplement nature’s failure to endow her with a bigger voice, as in Tatiana’s Letter Scene from Tchaikovsky’s Eugen Onegin, where you know something’s missing but the singing is so lovely and the emotions so clear you don’t care. The 34 selections on these well-filled discs include a Schubert set, where (oddly) she’s best in a rhythmically accented “An Sylvia”, a group of Handel pieces, and several off-beat items, among them a pair of Viennese operetta arias. There are very few misses here, the worst being the sonics that add base metal to Popp’s silver. [12/17/2003]
