Newly Released Recordings of Jessye Norman

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Crossover Media)

Towards the end of this past March, Decca Classics released a three-CD album entitled Jessye Norman: The Unreleased Masters. Unless I am mistaken, I first became aware of Norman in the late Seventies through a PBS program of a concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. However, I did not see her on the stage until she sang the role of Jocasta In a Metropolitan Opera staged production of Igor Stravinsky’s oratorio “Oedipus rex.” Several years later I happened to be in Aix-en-Provence when I was able to see her sing the role of Phedra in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Hippolyte et Aricie. (I also encountered her the following morning when my wife and I were wandering around the city, and I could not have been more of a gushing fanboy during our encounter!)

The recordings in this new collection were all made on much later dates. The earliest is a performance of Richard Strauss’ posthumously published Four Last Songs, which she sang with her Metropolitan Opera colleague James Levine conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. That partnership would resume in 1992, when they recorded Felix Mottl’s orchestration of Richard Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder. Those two recordings account for the second CD in the new release.

The next round of recordings all took place in Boston’s Symphony Hall in February of 1994. The Boston Symphony Orchestra was led by Seiji Ozawa conducting three compositions, each from a different century. The earliest of these was Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XXIVa/10 four-movement cantata Berenice, che fai? This was followed by Hector Berlioz’ “Cléopâtre,” which he had submitted for the 1829 Prix de Rome competition (which he did not win). The set concludes in the twentieth century with Benjamin Britten’s Opus 93, his Phaedra cantata, using Robert Lowell’s English translation of text taken from Jean Racine’s Phédre play. That set fills the third CD in the collection.

The first CD is also the recording of the latest session, which took place in Leipzig through much of March, concluding on April 1, 1998. The entire CD consists of selected excerpts from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde opera. Singing the role of Isolde, Norman is joined by tenor Thomas Moser (Tristan), mezzo Hanna Schwarz (Brangäne), and tenor Ian Bostridge (the young sailor heard at the beginning of the first act). The conductor is Kurt Masur, leading the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. (It may be worth noting, as an aside, that Wagner never appears in the Warner Classics 70-CD box set of recordings made Masur!)

Personally, I find the Tristan recording a feast unto itself, even though I almost always prefer complete opera recordings to excerpts. On the other hand, I rather like the idea of coupling this CD with the Wesendonck Lieder. Those who know their Wagner well probably know that Wagner described two of those songs, “Im Treibhaus” and “Träume,” as “studies” for the opera, which was “work in progress” when he composed the four songs. That said, I was  impressed that the entire collection should include repertoire from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; and I was more than delighted to encounter the breadth of Norman’s repertoire.