Customer Reviews

ONE OF THE GREAT TREASURE-HOUSES OF THE GRAMOPHONE - By: Klingsor Tristan, 18 Apr 2007
This series, produced by EMIin the days of LPs, is one of the great achievements of the gramophone - they rightfully belong up there with the Decca Ring, the EMI Callas series, & any other candidates you care to name. Together they provide a truly comprehensive survey of singing right through the age of recording up to the early days of the LP. Sadly, to the best of my knowledge, only Volumes 3 & 4 have appeared on CD - the very earliest era of recording & the period up to the introduction of electrical recording methods that were originally on Volumes 1 & 2 really deserve to be heard again.

Volume 3, the collection under discussion here, covers the period from 1926-1939. This was a veritable Golden Age of Singing -in Wagner it was the era of Leider, Schorr & Melchior; the Italian School included the likes of Gigli, Muzio & Pinza & so it goes on through a broad representative range of French, English & Slavic singers. One of the great strengths of this series is that the best-known singers tend to be represented by less familiar repertoire, so it's more unlikely that collectors will duplicate material they already know well. And, of course, there is a huge range of other singers you probably won't have heard & some you may well not even have heard of. They all have something to tell us, though, about the timesin which they worked, the styles of singing that were current then & the high standards that prevailedin the inter-war years. In some ways, the most surprising thing here is the strengthin depth of the less familiar Schools, the French & the Anglo-American. It is good to be reminded just how good the likes of Georges Thill, Eide Norena or Pierre Bernac were - or from the UK, Isobel Baillie, Walter Widdop & Heddle Nash. Then there are the discoveries like the delightfully named Lulu Mysz-Gmeinerin a Brahms folksong or the black American, Roland Hayes, who sings Monteverdi with piano accompaniment totally unauthentically by today's standards, but with an attractive reedy tenor voice that reminds me a lot of the underrated Wilfred Brown.

This set, now available from Testament, is a real treasure-trove. The transfers are all well-researched & of the highest quality. Anyone with an interestin how the art of singing has evolved over the last hundred years or so, or who just has a passion for glorious singing, should snap up this set of CDs - especially this volume as it displays a Golden Age of Singing at an amazingly low price.