Review - Joan Sutherland: The Complete Decca Recordings
Tim Ashley
Friday, November 29, 2024
Tim Ashley hears the first instalment in a reissue of Joan Sutherland’s complete recordings
The centenary of Joan Sutherland’s birth falls in November 2026, an anniversary marked by Decca with a re-release of her entire discography, 138 CDs in all, in three box-sets, due for completion by the close of 2025. It includes recordings that appeared on other labels, so Giulini’s 1959 EMI Don Giovanni, and the live Cologne Alcina with Ferdinand Leitner from the same year, commercially released by DG in 2009, will form part of the later boxes devoted to Sutherland’s recordings of complete operas.
First of all, however, we have a 37-disc set of recitals (operatic or otherwise), oratorios and a handful of other recordings, including two performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the closing scene of Act 2 from Solti’s Siegfried (not included complete in a later box, one assumes), in which she sings the Woodbird. Made between 1954 and 1987, the recordings encompass her entire career. And needless to say there is much here that is extraordinary.
The Covent Garden performances of Lucia di Lammermoor that propelled Sutherland both to greatness and stardom in 1959 are part of operatic mythology, though her earliest recordings indicate what was to come. We first hear her in 1954 in A Song of Welcome, a sycophantic cantata by Arthur Bliss, written to welcome the Queen and Prince Philip home from a Commonwealth tour, and the unmistakable beauty of her tone is immediately apparent. A 1958 performance of Bach’s Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben reveals greater radiance and poise, and in a scena from Donizetti’s Emilia di Liverpool, recorded for Belcantodisc also in 1958, with piano accompaniment played by her husband Richard Bonynge, her voice flows through the coloratura and ascends into the stratosphere with the thrilling ease that characterises so many of her later performances and recordings.
Those Covent Garden Lucias led to her first recital disc for Decca, made in Paris in April the same year with Nello Santi and the Conservatoire Orchestra, in which ‘Regnava nel silenzio’ and the Mad Scene flank arias from Ernani, I vespri siciliani and Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix, and although standard theatre cuts are observed – something Sutherland later avoided both on stage and on disc – the radiance of her voice and the technical brilliance of her singing are beyond dispute. Her diction is good, too: the issues round the audibility of words that later caused critical controversy are as yet not in evidence.
In 1960, however, came ‘The Art of the Prima Donna’, among the most famous recitals ever recorded. It broke ground in a number of ways. The two-LP format was essentially new and one that Sutherland would adopt for a number of sets that followed: ‘Command Performance’ in 1962, ‘The Age of Bel Canto’ (1964) and ‘Romantic French Arias’ (1969). ‘The Art of the Prima Donna’ is conducted by Francesco Molinari-Pradelli, though Bonynge’s influence as musicologist looms large over the repertory, which encompasses music from the early 18th to the late 19th centuries, each aria associated with a great singer from the past (‘Martern aller Arten’ with Lilli Lehmann, Thomas’s Hamlet Mad Scene with Melba, and so on), in part an exploration of operatic history, though it also defines Sutherland as the natural heir to a great tradition of virtuoso singers.
It is not without flaws. Molinari-Pradelli can be sluggish. The deployment of the chorus is oddly inconsistent, present in ‘Casta diva’ from Norma, for instance, but missing in Amina’s Act 1 scena from La Sonnambula, which weakens its impact. But Sutherland is spectacularly good, and deeply committed to everything she does, so much so that some critics, on the set’s subsequent reissues, admitted to preferring her singing here to the complete recordings she subsequently made of 10 of the 16 roles included.
‘Command Performance’ is in many ways even more remarkable. Her first recital with Bonynge as conductor, it consists of arias and songs that were – or could have been – heard at private concerts given by Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle. There’s a blazing performance, among the greatest on disc, of ‘Ocean! Thou mighty monster’ from Weber’s Oberon and a breathtaking account of the closing aria from Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda (which is indeed better than the subsequent complete recording, fine though that is). But there are also popular arias and songs of the day, such as Balfe’s ‘I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls’ and Bishop’s ‘Lo! Here the gentle lark’, done with such unaffected sincerity that sentimental associations just fade away. The recording itself, magnificently engineered, wonderfully captures the sheer amplitude of her voice, which always knocked you sideways in the theatre.
‘The Age of Bel Canto’ is uneven but attempts something different yet again. Sutherland and Bonynge are joined by Marilyn Horne and the American tenor Richard Conrad for arias and ensembles, again from the 18th and 19th centuries. The high points come with Sutherland powering her way through ‘Furia di donna irata’ from Piccinni’s La buona figliuola, and a sensational account of Odabella’s first aria from Verdi’s Attila that leaves you open-mouthed with astonishment and craving the entire opera. The weakness is Conrad, who has a pleasantly small voice and a remarkable trill but doesn’t quite hold his own against the two divas. ‘Romantic French Arias’, another solo recital, is a consistent delight, however. Sutherland has fun with ‘L’éclat de rire’ from Auber’s Manon Lescaut, gives us her first taste of Olympia in Les contes d’Hoffmann and sounds ravishing in ‘Idole de ma vie’ from Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable.
Her appealing way with Victorian ballads and songs in ‘Command Performance’, meanwhile, marked the start of regular forays into a more popular repertory. There’s a disc from 1966 of songs by Noël Coward, a friend and later neighbour of the Bonynges in Switzerland, and the following year saw the release of ‘Love Live Forever’, another two-disc set subtitled ‘The Romance of Musical Comedy’, though most of the numbers come from French or Viennese operetta. The opening track, in which her voice soars in rapturous melismas over a chorus singing ‘Come boys! Let’s all be gay boys!’ from The Student Prince is both fabulous and deliriously camp.
In 1965, however, came ‘Joy to the World’, a Christmas album, and one of the best ever made. It might seem a curious choice with which to discuss the issues surrounding Sutherland’s diction but it illustrates them perfectly. In the 1960s there were adverse comments aplenty about her inability or unwillingness to project a text, a fault less noticeable in her work in subsequent decades. In some respects this seems to have been very much a stylistic choice. In ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, taken at breakneck speed like a Sullivan patter-song, every word is crystal-clear, but in Gounod’s ‘O Divine Redeemer’, consonants and vowels are persistently sacrificed to absolute evenness of tone and purity of line. There are times, in fact, when it simply doesn’t matter. In ‘O Holy Night’ the words come and go, but the sound, as her voice soars and dips, is so utterly glorious that you just surrender.
Sacred music, meanwhile, is integral to the set. A great Handelian, she recorded Messiah twice. The first version, from 1961, with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, is conducted with old-school gravitas by Adrian Boult, and caused controversy in its day thanks to Sutherland’s decision to decorate her vocal lines, which her fellow soloists (Grace Bumbry, Kenneth McKellar and David Ward) did not. The later performance, from 1970, with Bonynge, the English Chamber Orchestra and the Ambrosian Singers, couldn’t be more different. Much underrated, this was one of the first recordings to attempt small-scale period engagement, albeit with conventional instruments, and it tingles with excitement. Arias and solos are decorated with operatic bravura, and Sutherland is joined by Huguette Tourangeau, Werner Krenn and Tom Krause in an exhilarating interpretation that essentially reimagines Messiah as a dramatic work for a big international cast.
In 1986 Sutherland was to make a foray into genuine period performance when, in a masterstroke of casting, she joined Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music for Handel’s Athalia. The work itself was pivotal, marking the emergence of Handelian oratorio from the ashes of his operatic career, and is dependent for its effect on a gradual shift of dramatic emphasis away from an increasingly isolated operatic protagonist to the collective power of the chorus. It’s one of Sutherland’s most striking performances, commanding in its virtuosity and strikingly intense in its exploration of the murderous Athalia’s guilty conscience.
She’s remarkably intense in Solti’s first Verdi Requiem, too, recorded with the Vienna Philharmonic and State Opera Chorus in 1967. As one might expect from Solti, this is the Requiem done as a relentless apocalyptic drama, far removed from the more reflective approach of de Sabata or Giulini. Sutherland leads a truly great quartet of soloists (she is joined by Horne, Luciano Pavarotti and Martti Talvela) and few sopranos have ever quite conveyed so vividly the sheer terror of the start of the ‘Libera me’. Neither of her recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth, however, is ideal. The first, from 1959, finds Ernest Ansermet on wonderful form with a tense and sinewy sounding OSR, but the singing, when we reach it, lacks focus. Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, with the VPO in 1965, gives a more loftily conventional interpretation, though the vocal and choral contributions (Horne and Talvela are again among the soloists, along with James King) are resplendently done.
Sutherland’s voice inevitably changed with time during the course of her career. The tone darkened, low notes became richer and more incisive, and though the top could blaze as thrillingly as it ever did, one notices the occasional moment of caution: in a disc of Mozart arias from 1980, which allows us to imagine what she might have been like as the Countess in Figaro, a high-lying phrase in the concert aria Vorrei spiegarvi, oh Dio! is transposed down. A disc of bel canto arias from 1985 finds her comfortably essaying mezzo repertory from Donizetti’s La favorite, Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (a lovely ‘Sur mes genoux’) and Il barbiere di Siviglia, though it was not a route she would ever follow.
The last recitals don’t always find her at her best, even within the context of the limitations she faced by then. ‘Talking Pictures’, an album of songs from the films she enjoyed in her Sydney childhood and adolescence, is touching in its bittersweet nostalgia. But the last disc, a programme of trios for soprano, piano and horn with Bonynge and Barry Tuckwell, is hampered by a throb in her tone and music that in itself is mostly undistinguished. It doesn’t detract, though, from the pleasure of a set that gives us so much of the best of her, and reminds us why she was ultimately one of the greatest and most astonishing singers of the 20th century.
The recordings
The Complete Decca Recordings: Recitals and Oratorios
Joan Sutherland (Decca)