Gundula Janowitz was admired for her pure, silvery tones–but alas, that considerable virtue isn’t enough to sustain interest throughout a 73-minute-long disc that induces boredom equaling the enervated lethargy of the faceless singing. Every so often I thought I detected a feeling of innigkeit or other sign of interpretive interest, but soon concluded it was simply a side-effect of caution by a singer husbanding her slim resources. The thin voice does have its attractions and Janowitz was a fine Mozart performer. But here she sings Weber, Wagner, and Strauss items that require tonal depth and vocal thrust simply unavailable to her. The selections also require a responsiveness to the text that’s absent from Janowitz’s priorities. So we’re left with a pretty voice–and it is a lovely instrument–and not much else, certainly not consonants that make the words comprehensible.
The best-known item here is the Karajan-led Strauss Four Last Songs, which many listeners cite as the best recorded version. I don’t. The orchestra is as gooey as the rice in a bad Chinese restaurant, and the confluence of a singer solely concerned with legato phrasing and a conductor similarly obsessed combines to render this languid version an exercise in soporific effects. The torpor carries through seven tracks devoted to the unnecessary reissue of a Deutsche Grammophon LP led by Ferdinand Leitner (or at least he’s credited with standing in front of the orchestra). It opens badly, with an uninvolved and uninvolving “Leise, leise” and then slides down the precipice to an ill-advised rendition of “Ozean, du Ungeheuer!” from Weber’s Oberon, in which the small-voiced singer takes on a staple of the dramatic soprano repertoire. I wonder why; perhaps she intended to make the ultimate party record. If so, she comes close. In this big aria, pretty ain’t enough.
Nor is it sufficient for the Wagner arias that follow, sung with a sameness and vocal equipment too slim even for these lighter-voiced Wagner heroines. The pair of Schubert songs that separate the treacly big works with orchestra go well enough to make me believe that Decca would have left us with a far better impression of the singer had it focused on her Mozart and lieder recordings. But weird choices are all too common in The Singers series. Like the others, this one substitutes convenient booklet standbys like texts and translations for stuff only accessible on your computer. Unlike most of the others in The Singers series, the sound is subpar: the voice is shrill on many tracks, especially at louder volume levels, and the orchestral sound reminds you that in the late 1960s and ’70s Deutsche Grammophon favored extreme multi-miking techniques that resulted in the aural equivalent of melting plastic.
