As with her increasingly attention-getting on-stage career, with each new recording soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian shows intelligent repertoire choices and a keen awareness of her voice and its technical and expressive capacity at a given period in its development and maturity. Here she delivers an absolutely captivating recital of songs by Pauline Viardot-Garcia, herself a celebrated opera singer throughout Europe in the 19th century, creating several roles and popularizing others, retiring from the stage in 1863 to teach, write (a singing method), and compose, mostly songs. And what excellent songs they are, incorporating various languages and cultural traditions, especially from her native France and her Spanish heritage. With titles like “Bonjour mon coeur”, “Havanaise”, “Die Sterne”, “Madrid”, “Die Beschwörung”, and “Chanson de la pluie”, you immediately realize just how stylistically and culturally wide-ranging the repertoire is. Several of the songs, such as “Seize-ans”, “Aime-moi”, and “La fête”, are based on Chopin mazurkas, a clever idea that Viardot-Garcia pulls off with real pizazz, abetted by a playful Bayrakdarian, who totally engages us with a “smile” in her voice. “Aime-moi” is especially lovely and full of personality, with the soprano easily negotiating the runs and leaps and swirling coloratura passages, throwing in an occasional trill. The “Havanaise” is a real tour de force that’s drenched in Spanish/Cuban flavor, from its “habanera” rhythm to the sensuously romantic melody–another gem that Bayrakdarian seems to absolutely love singing.
In fact, she’s completely at home in this repertoire, and her extraordinarily agile and accurate voice–its medium-bodied tone very rich and solid, yet with a pleasing bright quality–is an ideal instrument to bring out its varied colors and interpretive nuances. And it’s only in this last area that I believe Bayrakdarian needs just a bit more time and experience to bring music such as this to its fullest potential. She needs to open up a bit more expressively and relax into less carefully controlled phrasing. Occasionally her sound on a particular note doesn’t agree in color with the syllable being sung or doesn’t naturally flow from the previous note. Nevertheless, as I’ve said before, Isabel Bayrakdarian is one of today’s rising stars, a singer with grace, style, intelligence, and the talent to take her as far as she wants to go. Discs such as this one make following her career pure pleasure. [2/4/2005]
