Music: Priceless

National Review, Jan 27, 2003 by Jay Nordlinger

Sometime last summer, a new Marilyn Horne disc emerged on the market. It was of a live recital, given in Salzburg in 1979. Many of us were excited to have this CD -- it captured the great mezzo-soprano at the "peak of her powers," as critics like to say. Allow me to quote a little from the review I wrote. It serves my present purposes.

What is it about a vocal recital? A good one is maybe the most moving, most memorable thing in music. . . . It is also a hard thing to capture on a recording, the mesmerizing, rapturous vocal recital. Such an event is most keenly felt in the hall. I believe that I attended 13 different recitals by Leontyne Price. Some were average (though Price's average was very high), and some were eerily exalted. And this phenomenon was never captured on recordings. There have been two Price recital discs released, and neither comes close to conveying what a Price recital was really like. . . . Future generations will just have to trust us "old- timers." And then, when the old-timers are gone, testimony will be lost. There will be only the [two] recordings, in all their inadequacy.

Well, well, what have we here? A third recital disc, and this one does the job -- almost. No, it is not like being there, but it conveys a strong impression of what the experience entailed. It turns out that RCA -- Leontyne Price's label -- recorded her Carnegie Hall recital debut, which took place on February 28, 1965. For some reason, that recording was never released -- no one at the company can now say why.

We were given a taste of this recital in 1996, when RCA put out its big compilation, The Essential Leontyne Price. On the last of these eleven discs, there was a live Zigeunerlieder, a song-cycle of Brahms. It was superb, and revealed Price's rare gift for lieder. Where had those little cuts come from? They had come from the Carnegie Hall debut, as we now have learned.

The disc has been released under the title Leontyne Price Rediscovered. Given this retired singer's continuing stardom, it would have seemed that she needed no rediscovery. But, in a way, she did. Her greatness as an opera singer is amply documented, with dozens of CDs memorializing her in a multitude of roles. But what about Price the recitalist? It has frustrated some of us that she has never quite gotten her due in the song repertory. She was, as I have indicated, a marvelous interpreter of German art songs, and she was equally adept in the French repertory, and, in the American realm, she was practically untouchable. Not for nothing did Samuel Barber, among others, turn over his songs to her practically before the ink was dry.

Most important, though, was the spell that Price would cast over her audience. The force of her musical personality is literally indescribable (I apologize). She had a historic voice, of course, and a brilliant musical head, and mounds of technique. Some people argue that she is the best, most complete, singer ever (although this is merely a parlor game, or brawl). But what set her apart was a certain spirituality that made her recitals more than musical.

It is interesting to note that Price's final recital in Carnegie Hall - - January 1991 -- is also available on CD. (It is one of the two I complained about, as insufficient. It is certainly worth having, however -- I would be reluctant to part with mine.) Therefore, RCA has provided us with bookends: the debut in 1965 and the farewell to that house almost three decades later. (Price stopped concertizing in 1997.)

In 1965, Price was 38 years old, perhaps not fully seasoned, but undoubtedly herself. Her voice is lighter, obviously, than it would become; but it is less light than it had been. The "new" recital catches Price in what might be called her early middle period.

All Price recitals followed a pattern: She would begin with a Baroque set, usually Handel, maybe some Bach. And she might do some Mozart before going on to a lieder group, which could be Schubert, Wolf, Marx (Joseph), Strauss, or some combination of composers. And then, before intermission, she would usually give you a biggish opera aria, just to remind you of that "other" professional life she was leading.

After intermission, you would get the French set -- Debussy, Faure, any number of others -- followed by the American group. Here she would champion her personal friends: Barber, Lee Hoiby, Ned Rorem, Margaret Bonds. And then, always, she would include spirituals. She liked to say, "I have sung your Lied. Now you will listen to mine, thank you very much." And who could object?

Once the "printed program" was finished, there would often be what is sometimes referred to as a "second concert" -- a slew of encores, with the audience screaming ever more hoarsely.

In the Rediscovered recital, Price begins with Handel, three opera arias. The first is "Care selve" from Atalanta, which Price adored, and of which she made a famous studio recording with orchestra. She did not sing Handel the way they -- "they," the Baroque-music commissars -- want you to now, but she sang him magnificently. She could be opulent, but she was also tasteful, and her way with the Baroque repertory was one of the most admirable things about her.