What a bore! Denyce Graves is the owner of a luxurious, plushly-upholstered-in-amber voice of ample size, perfectly evenly produced throughout her two octave range, with no audible breaks in register or quality, but, judging from the CD at least, she has absolutely no interpretive skills or interest. Where is the longing we usually hear in Gluck’s Orfeo? Where is Dido’s world-weariness and sadness? And why does the love-struck, anxious Princess (in Cilea’s Adiraian Lecouvreur) sound as if she’s ordering dinner? Graves’ Carmen and Dalila are cookie-cutter seductive and willful and absolutely interchangeable, and Massenet’s Charlotte sounds oddly like Handel’s Dardano (from Amadigi di Gaula). The little aria for Gioconda’s mother is as well sung as Santuzza’s “Voi lo sapete”, and the same may be said for Samuel Barber’s Vanessa and Donizetti’s Leonora (in La Favorita). Maurizio Barbacini offers little stimulation (although the Baroque arias are interestingly embellished), and the Münchner Rundfunkorchester accompanies handsomely, but this CD goes nowhere emotionally and actually winds up boring the listener.
