As the advertising slogan has it: What becomes a legend most? Well, if it’s a legendary singer the answer is a re-release of her best recordings. That’s what we should expect from Decca’s The Singers series, but it’s not what we get in the entry devoted to Leontyne Price, who deserves much better. All of the selections were recorded in the early 1980s, when Price was past her prime. On many nights, she could still electrify opera house audiences with her Aida and other Verdi heroines, but her recordings were often marred by the increasing distance between still-exciting top notes, a loose, hoarse middle voice, and a steadily weakening bottom range. We can hear this all too vividly in the Aida excerpts–a raw, tonally hooded “Rittorna vincitor!” punctuated by thrillingly sculpted high notes, and a decent if effortful “O patria mia”, where her soft singing is smudged by cloudy timbre. Even at her best Price was prey to scooping and a blowsy chest voice, and some of that appears here too. Sometimes, as in “Ecco l’orrido campo” from Un ballo in maschera, such failings can be excused as helping to characterize the hapless heroine wandering around a graveyard at midnight, but elsewhere it’s less excusable. Not many vocal discs make you want to periodically clear your throat, but this one does. If you’re a Price fan, you’ll treasure her Verdi arias from whatever stage of her career, but non-fanatics will skip this in favor of her earlier RCAs. The Verdi arias are accompanied by Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic with more energy than finesse.
Verdi is followed by seven disastrous tracks of seasonal music, opening with “He shall feed his flock” and “How beautiful are the feet” from Handel’s Messiah, both purportedly sung in English and seriously contending for the title of most unidiomatic Handel recordings of the past quarter-century. The rest are revoltingly soupy arrangements of César Franck’s Panis angelicus and some Christmas carols, the singing and context making them painful to hear. Yes, Price was a great singer worthy of inclusion in a series of great vocalists, but Decca has done her and her admirers, among whom I count myself, a gross disservice.
