The effect is all the more phenomenal because Sutherland’s voice - unlike those of most of the terminally pure singers who tackle Handel - is so ample, so well-nourished, and so (to use an adjective I’ve used of other singers) polychromatic. She’s taking “Tornami a vagheggiar” at a terrific lick, just because she can. I confess I prefer the one where you can’t make out the words. Yet now go back to the recording and just relish the amazing speed, sweep, and freedom. If you want to hear her do so, then try this undated but slower and surely earlier recording: This, too, is wonderful, with brighter words, fewer scoops up into notes, and maybe even more astounding lustre in the sustained notes. I’d like to hear her enounce the words that I think say one thing while Handel’s music says another. I don’t exonerate Sutherland for blurry diction. (And there’s a further layer of expressive complexity, often revealed by stage action or choreography: the music often expresses things the composer never imagined.) When Brangäne in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde tells the lovers to “Beware! Beware!”, everything in the music says the opposite. Opera abounds with such expressive complexity. In both cases, the words are more consciously clever, the music more marvellously innocent – and that two-tier expression, an inbuilt irony, is part of the fascination. The tune of Sullivan’s “The sun whose rays are all ablaze with ever-living glory” is not in the same mindset as Gilbert’s words. Lorenz Hart’s words “Falling in love with love is falling for make-believe” are not in the same spirit as the song to which Richard Rodgers set them. Many of the great composers began with the tune, then added the words, rather than the other way around. We all know that many composers re-used the same music to different words anyway - and/or to different expressive effects. Have we been too (fave word) logocentric? Here, however, is where I turn around to make the opposite point: music is not always there to serve words. Much of the time, I’ve been saying the same. If - like anyone with a heart and soul - you rejoice in her singing here, what does this tell us about music itself? All of you have been writing in abouthow important it is to make words register in vocal music. I’ve known this recording for forty years even now, I can’t listen to it without my breathing changing and a sense of the whole world becoming brighter and more joyous.Īnd yet you really can’t make out Sutherland’s words in this recording. This is lark-like abundance, while its echo effects within an unbroken phrase have the quality of play that perhaps lies at the heart of art itself. As for the marvels of presto passagework, she both reveals the intensely civilised nature of this baroque music and opens up its return to nature. How on earth can anyone hold up Sutherland as a star exponent of bel canto style?īut how can they not? Who is so sadly emaciated of heart as to resist this miraculous singing , so stunning in energy, brio, effulgence, brilliance, lustre? Beyond even the thrill of her rhythmic attack and the cascading glory of her coloratura, I adore the gleam with which she sustains longer notes - for example at 0.29, 1.17, 2.56 - like powerful shafts of light.
And she loves to scoop her way up into the opening note of a phrase. Her diction is perfectly rotten (rotten here in Italian, the most singable of all languages – you actually often wonder which line of the libretto she’s singing - but in other recordings equally rotten in her native English and other tongues too). What’s more, she transposes it up, up, up.Īnd I have not begun to list her two most basic faults, which you can hear perfectly well here. Shocking, I know, like Russia invading Ukraine. Purists, block your ears with wax! Sutherland, singing the title role of the opera Alcina, here steals the aria of the opera’s second soprano, Morgana. Today I give you Joan Sutherland in another Handel aria: perhaps the opposite experience, but to me no less marvellous. Compare and contrast! Yesterday I gave you Beverly Sills’s singing of one Handel aria: those of you who loved it praised the way she made the words count, while those of you who had problems with it were bothered by vocalism but not elocution.