Benita Valenti: Great Singer(s) of the Century

Robert Croan weighs in on a new collection showcasing Valenti's brilliance:

Benita Valenti: Great Singers of the Century, Vol.1. Bridge****

This exquisite disc should be a must for all lovers of singing and the human voice. Soprano Benita Valenti, who turned 75 last year, [Oct.2009] is an exceptional artist who put all her musical and intellectual resources to the benefit of the music, rather than personal show or glitter. This collection of art songs in four languages (culled from recordings made between 1969-89) shows the soprano’s pure vowels, supported tone, controlled legato, clear diction and uncluttered phrasing that gets right to the meaning of the words. Any individual song might well serve as a singing lesson.
Of course it’s much more than that. Every piece tells a story, or creates a personality, as in the eight Lieder from Wolf’s “Italian Songbook,” each the outpouring of a teenage girl coming of age. The way she distinguishes, by use of nuance, between the boy and girl verses in Brahms’s “Futile Serenade” is another example of her high art, while Handel’s familiar “Lascia ch’io pianga” (from “Rinaldo”) gains a new dimension from her imaginative ornamentation of the repeat.
The real classic here is Schubert’s “The Shepherd on the Rock,” a cantata-like Lied with clarinet obbligato in addition to the tradition keyboard accompaniment. Her collaborators here – from a famous Marlboro Festival performance – are pianist Rudolf Serkin and clarinetist Harold Wright, and it’s a rendition that can bear the word “immortal” without exaggeration.
Among the other pianists, Richard Goode, in the German groups, is outstanding, but Lydia Artymiw’s Debussy accompaniments, and David Effron’s in four Obradors songs, are hardly far behind. (Robert Croan)