It was said that the gloriously deep-voiced, vocally agile and expressive Dame Clara Butt (1872-1936) could be heard across the English Channel if the wind was blowing in the right direction, and listening to this collection of arias and songs, it seems possible. The sound is dark and rich, and even in the earliest, dimmest of these recordings (they date from 1909 to 1925) we can sense how huge it was.
Her version of Beethoven’s “In questa tomba oscura” probably has never been surpassed for sheer gloom content, and while other mezzos or contraltos from her era have sung Orsini’s “Brindisi” from Lucrezia Borgia more spectacularly (Sigrid Onegin and Ernestine Schumann-Heink come to mind), Butt’s fluency and bass-like bottom notes are unique and fascinating. She also has a terrific, true trill. Her “O don fatale” from Don Carlo is transposed down a tone-and-a-half and well articulated; an aria from Elijah is the picture of dignity. When an alternate series of notes is possible she always takes the low options, but then again, that’s her forte.
But be warned: hers is not a voice to everyone’s liking. At times she can be weirdly hooty and vibrato free, at others, some lowish notes are so baritonal as to be more circus-like than lovely. Also, opera lovers should be cautioned that more than a half-hour of this CD is taken up with songs, some of them of amazingly dubious quality, indeed bordering on camp. But Butt was a phenomenon–all six feet two of her–and she’s never dull.