Felicia Weathers: Verdi & Puccini Arias

From Decca's Classic Recitals series, here is an unusual item -- American-born soprano Felicia Weathers' 1967 album of Verdi & Puccini Arias. Listeners based in the United States should be forgiven for not knowing of her -- though she studied voice at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, her career was almost entirely centered in Germany and she recorded for the German branch of Decca. Weathers did sing for the Chicago Lyric Opera in the 1960s and made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1965, but voluntarily ended her opera career in 1972, reputedly owing to strain on the voice. She has remained active in German-speaking lands ever since, both as a teacher and recitalist.
This disc, which is nearly an exact reproduction in digipak form of an album recorded in late 1966 features Weathers in familiar extracts from Verdi's Don Carlo and Otello and Puccini's Manon Lescaut, Madame Butterfly ("Un bel di"), Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi, and Turandot, a role for which she was particularly renowned. She is backed by the Vienna Opera Orchestra under the prolific and underrated Italian conductor Argeo Quadri, who creates a most responsive and sensitive accompaniment for Weathers on the whole, though there are portions where the band overpowers the singer a bit, not to mention some horns whose intonation sounds less than fresh. The recording is a little odd in that certain instruments drift around in the stereo picture, but Weathers, at least, is front and center, and the recording is crisp and not dated.
Weathers' voice is a small one that makes a big effect, her sense of pitch is uncannily true, and she employs a quick vibrato that is in itself impressively musical. She doesn't have any idiosyncratic quirks to her singing; it is very straightforward and realizes the notes on the page just as they are. On the other hand, she doesn't add a lot of depth to the characterization of the roles involved, but she's not singing in an opera production here, just the arias, and focusing on delivering them as well as she can sing them. It's such a great voice, and some who have reviewed this disc have remarked with some degree of regret about "what might have been" in speaking about Weathers. It seems more appropriate, however, to speak about what's clearly here: superb singing. Weathers did make a few more albums for German Decca, including a recital of sacred and folk song settings by Zoltán Kodály. Hopefully Decca's issuance of Verdi & Puccini Arias on CD will give us more to look forward to in terms of digital offerings from Felicia Weathers.