Shéhérazade (Frederica von Stade recording)

Tristan Klingsor

Alan Blyth reviewed the album on LP in Gramophone in July 1981, comparing von Stade's performance of Chansons madécasses with a version sung by Janet Baker,[3] and comparing her performance of Shéhérazade with versions sung by Baker,[4] Régine Crespin[5] and Jessye Norman.[6][7]

Shéhérazade, he wrote, was usually sung by a soprano, but, like Baker before her, Frederica von Stade had demonstrated that the cycle could be successfully performed by a mezzo-soprano too. The only point at which the work's tessitura had challenged her was the climax of "Asie", where her tone had blanched at Ravel's taxing high B flat.[7]

Technically, her reading was notable for her prodigious breath control, which allowed her to eschew the breaks of phrase perpetrated by some of her predecessors. Her diction, moreover, was now better than it had been on some of her earlier recordings. Interpretatively, her performance "catches to perfection the languorous, sultry feeling" of both Ravel's music and Tristan Klingsor's poetry.[7]

Conducting, Seiji Ozawa was wise in his choice of tempos, avoiding the "stodgy" pacing that had to some extent compromised Norman's performance of the cycle under Sir Colin Davis.

Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi

Indeed, in "L'indifférent", Ozawa outpaced not just Davis but also Crespin's Ernest Ansermet, but without detracting from the "lazy seductiveness of this glorious song". Crespin's LP had stood at the pinnacle of the Shéhérazade discography for many years, but von Stade's was close to supplanting it.[7]

Baker's, Crespin's and Norman's discs of the cycle had all coupled it with Hector Berlioz's Les nuits d'été. Von Stade had followed an arguably more intelligent path and programmed other music by Ravel instead. She sang his Greek folk melodies with a happy insouciance and his Hebrew songs with an appropriate focused intensity, but her outstanding performances in her filler items were in the Chansons madécasses, "which still have the power to shock even fifty-five years after they were written". Her readings were remarkable for their "accomplishment in mood-painting and word definition". Baker had sung these evocations of Madagascar sensuously, but von Stade had marginally surpassed her, with "a timbre just a little better suited to their earthy voluptuousness".[7]

The playing of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was first class. "Altogether this is a well compiled, imaginatively executed digital disc of some music that should be in every respectable collection".[7]

George Jellinek reviewed the album on LP in Stereo Review in September 1981. It offered more of Ravel's songs than were commonly found on a single disc, he wrote, and there was much about it to like. Its components were balanced meticulously, Frederica von Stade's colleagues played their instruments well and her own performances were characterized by "her musicianship, tonal purity and idiomatic handling of the texts".[8]

Maurice Ravel, photographed by Pierre Petit in 1906, two years after Shéhérazade was first performed

This said, her interpretations had their disappointments. The timbre of her voice and the volume and feeling of her singing were all insufficiently variegated. Her reading of the Hebrew songs lacked "earthiness", and although she conveyed some of the "primitive elements" in the Chansons madécasses, she failed "to hint at the fierceness in such a song as 'Aoua!'".[8]

It was true that a lot of her singing was so lovely as to verge on the hypnotic. ("Ravel's exquisite sonorities tend to dull the senses".) But she should have offered "more angularity, or, perhaps, more spontaneity". Columbia's audio quality was wonderful.[8]

J. B. Steane reviewed the album in Gramophone in January 1982. In Shéhérazade, he wrote, Jessye Norman's[6] reading had "a more sensuous luxury of gorgeous tone", von Stade's "more tang, more appetite, more liveliness". Von Stade's singing of the Chansons madécasses was beautifully expressive too, "with the evening stillness and relaxation of the last song marvellously well caught".[9]

Steane returned to the album in Gramophone in January 1998, reviewing a compilation CD[10] which coupled von Stade's Shéhérazade with her later recordings of Berlioz's Les nuits d'été and Claude Debussy's La damoiselle élue. He had become fond of von Stade's singing, he wrote, because she "brought to everything, but especially the French repertoire, a personal touch which was partly a matter of timbre, partly of style, partly a fusion of both, evoking a kind of affectionate sadness, exactly the mood for 'L'indifférent'". There was no denying that when she sang a passage that was particularly high or particularly loud, her voice no longer sounded as fresh as it had done in her youth. But for the most part, her Shéhérazade was fine, exemplified in "L'indifférent" by "the caress (an exquisitely gentle portamento) in the 'séduisante' and the forlornly wistful invitation 'Entre'".[11]

Patrick O'Connor reviewed the album in Gramophone in June 2004 in a survey of the Shéhérazade discography. "Von Stade", he wrote, "sounds almost too nice and friendly, like Cherubino embarking on a prank"[12]

David Shengold mentioned the album in Opera News in December 2016 when reviewing a box set of von Stade's Columbia recordings[1] in which it had been included. "The capable all-Ravel recording", he wrote, "... generically led by Ozawa, offers a superb 'Kaddisch'."[13]

The album was nominated for a Grammy award for the best classical solo vocal performance of 1981.[14]

• Frederica von Stade (b. 1945), mezzo-soprano
• Boston Symphony Orchestra, (tracks 1-7)
• Seiji Ozawa (b. 1935), conductor (tracks 1-7)
• Doriot Anthony Dwyer (b. 1922), flute (tracks 8-10)
• Jules Eskind, cello (tracks 8-10)
• Martin Katz (b. 1944), piano (tracks 8-10)[1]

• Paul Walter Myers (1932-2015), producer
• Budd Graham, engineer
• Martin Greenblatt, engineer
• Milton Cherin, engineer