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Cristina Deutekom Sings Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, and Verdi Arias from Armida, Attila, Battaglia di Legnano, Capuleti e i Montecchi, Don Carlo, Ernani, Linda di Chamounix, I lombardi alla prima crociata, Puritani, Sonnambula, Traviata, Trovatore, Vespri siciliani
With Sona Ardontz, Guido Fabbris, William McKinney, Alessandro Maddalena Orchestra of RAI, Rome, Monte Carlo Opera Chorus and Orchestra Carlo Franci, conductor
Philips (distributed by PolyGram) 432 733-2 (2 CDs)
At a taping session in the early I970s a Philips engineer approached Cristina Deutekom with great deference and confided to her that, after the trumpet, it was her voice that he and his colleagues found to be the instrument most difficult to record without distortion.l The soprano accepted this statement as a high compliment, but the truth is that more than a few commentators have described said voice, perhaps the most intensely brilliant one of its generation, as being merely shrill and edgy.
This estimation seems to have arisen out of a particular prejudice-that a soprano who is a historically great Queen of the Night cannot, by definition, competently perform any other role or type of music -- compounded by an increasingly widespread inability to understand exactly what the true dramatic coloratura voice is supposed to sound like.
Deutekom was a singer wholly trained for the dimensions of a large theater, not one who artificially darkened her voice or damped its overtones to accommodate the more cosseting requirements of the microphone. She was thus an anomaly in her time, a throwback to the earliest days of recordings: a high soprano whose tone was possessed of a concentration and penetration that flashed excitingly and had tremendous carrying power when mellowed by the surrounding space of the opera house but which could sound somewhat thin and strident on disc. In this she could be contrasted with a great many of her contemporaries, who had trouble with throatiness and a lid-on-the-voice quality that compromised audibility and impact in live circumstances but who sound warm, lush, and nonthreatening on the recordings by which they will be remembered.
Deutekom made a relatively late debut (at thirty-two, in Amsterdam, as the Queen of the Night) precisely because hers was no soubrette voice but a dramatic instrument, despite its extension up to the high F...