A newly remastered collection of four original Decca albums featuring the Spanish mezzo-soprano at the height of her powers in the repertoire most associated with her, from Rossini to folk and popular songs from her native Spain.
Born in 1935, Teresa Berganza was in her mid-twenties when she made the recordings on this album, yet she was already the darling of the opera press by June 1959 when Decca first issued the wide-ranging recital of Rossini arias which opens this anthology, moving with assured mastery from the flirtatious Isabella in ‘L’italiana in Algeri’ to the grave beauty of ‘Fac ut portem’ from the ‘Stabat mater’. Later the same year, she recorded a sequence of eight Basque songs with orchestra which captivatingly exploits the dark, sultry shadings within her mezzo. Although the Rossini LP has been issued piecemeal on CD, this is the first time the recital appears in its entirety.
A year later, Berganza was established as an artist of singular gifts who would lend distinction to the extraordinary ‘gala sequence’ inserted in the second act of the label’s new Viennese recording of ‘Die Fledermaus’, capable of standing her own alongside the likes of Björling, Nilsson, Sutherland and Tebaldi. Her contribution to that album was a Lullaby by her husband Félix Lavilla which they recorded together not in Vienna but Kingsway Hall, London.
As her long-standing accompanist, Lavilla partnered Berganza in a 1962 recital of Spanish songs that capture the mezzo-soprano in vibrant form, bringing her flaring tone, dramatic energy and captivating charisma to Baroque arias by Pergolesi and Scarlatti as well as songs by Granados and Turina, finishing with a classic account of Falla’s ‘Siete canciones populares españolas’ from 1959. As Richard Wigmore remarks in his new booklet appreciation, not even the legendary Conchita Supervia gave a more thrilling, spine-tingling performance of the cycle’s concluding ‘Polo’. (© Decca Music Group Limited / Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd.)