Anthologizing Victoria de los Ángeles

The latest anthology of performances from the twentieth century that I have encountered constitutes a shift away from conductors in favor of a major vocalist. That vocalist is the Catalan Spanish lyric soprano Victoria de los Ángeles. While I have been familiar with her name ever since my student days, my only encounter with her performing came from the Tribute to Gerald Moore recital, where she was one of three vocalists that had spent much of her time working with Moore as her accompanist. (The other two vocalists performing in that recital were soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.) The CD of that recital is one of the 59 CDs that can found in Victoria de los Ángeles: The Warner Classics Edition; Complete Recordings on His Master’s Voice & La Voix de son maître. This collection will be released one week from today; and, as expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

It has been a while since I have reported on a vocal anthology. According to my records, my last article involved Profil’s “early recordings” of Fischer-Dieskau. However, writing about vocalists requires approaches that differ from accounts of conductors or instrumental soloists.

One may say that, like Fischer-Dieskau, de los Ángeles inhabited two decidedly different venues. One was the opera house and the other was the recital stage. Thus, while I have tended to approach anthologies in terms of the different historical eras, I feel it desirable to first sort her albums according to those two venues, along with a concluding category that departs from the “classical” repertoire in favor of traditional songs, many of which are anonymous.

One result of this approach is that the categories vary significantly in size. As a result, I shall begin with the shortest of those categories, which is pre-classical opera. This accounts for only two compositions. The longer of these, requiring two CDs, is the second (1727) version of Antonio Vivaldi’s Orlando furioso. The single CD accounts for Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

The latter is the only one that I have seen in a staged performance, and I was particularly impressed by the ways in which Purcell’s music established the diversity of character types. Ironically, the conductor for the recorded performance was John Barbirolli, meaning that I had already given an account of it on December 30, 2020! Readers may recall that I was disappointed that the performance was not particularly “historically informed,” meaning that there was little sense of character in any of the vocal performances, including that of de los Ángeles’ account of Dido.

I am not sure if I have previously encountered the Vivaldi opera or if my only contact with Orlando involved another composer. Basically, I know it for one of the most convoluted narratives I have encountered. On her recording, de los Ángeles sang the role of Angelica, who has to contend with two rivals. One of them is Medoro (sung by tenor Lajos Kozma), who is betrothed to Angelica. The other is the title character (sung by mezzo Marilyn Horne), who is jealous of Medoro. As might be guessed, the libretto by Grazio Braccioli, based on Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso, tends to treat Angelica as a secondary character. (To be fair, Dido does not receive particularly better treatment, since she only appears in the opening and closing scenes.)

In other words, in both of these operas, de los Ángeles’ role is relatively secondary; and the opportunity to relish her vocal skills are few and far between. Fortunately, where opera is concerned, her repertoire takes a “great leap forward” from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. As a result, the next category to be addressed will account for a significantly richer collection of CDs!