Utterly unique, occasionally off-putting

I have written about Janowitz several times before (find the links below), so I won’t reiterate my affection for her utterly unique, occasionally off-putting, frequently ravishingly beautiful voice.

Non-specialists in baroque music frequently performed the Pergolesi Stabat Mater back in the day, so finding Janowitz singing it with the Berlin Philharmonic in a Salzburg Festival broadcast led by Claudio Abbado from 1968 isn’t all that unusual.

We must be very grateful that many European radio services regularly put together top-flight opera performances for broadcast: in this case, German Radio along with RAI, ORTF and the BBC. Without them we wouldn’t have many unique and valuable recordings including today’s Haydn featuring an unusually fiery Janowitz as Armida.

Schumann’s oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri isn’t performed so often, but in the forthcoming season it will even be staged twice, in Paris with Johanni van Oostrum and Samuel Hasselhorn and at the Theater an der Wien with the ubiquitous Elsa Dreisig.

After listening to Janowitz for this CC installment, I was thinking about her very unique sound. Then I happened to pull up a recording of this weekend’s Capriccio from the Salzburg Festival. I of course skipped right to the midnight music and then the final monologue and I was astonished at how much Elsa Dreisig reminded me of Janowitz in that music.

I have only heard Dreisig in person once: last fall she was Sifare in Mozart’s Mitridate, Re di
Ponto at the Berlin Staatsoper. She sang really beautifully and sounded much more individual than she had on the Minkowski recording made several years earlier. The Capriccio which I’ve listened to twice has made me curious to hear more of Dreisig who currently sings an interestingly wide range of music. However, I don’t hear Janowitz so much in this bit from the Vier Letzte Lieder.

Pergolesi: Stabat Mater

Gundula Janowitz
Maureen Forrester

Berlin Philharmonic
Conductor: Claudio Abbado
Salzburg Festival
6 August 1968
Broadcast

Haydn: Armida

Zelmira: Nancy Burns
Rinaldo: Waldemar Kmentt
Ubaldo: Werner Hollweg
Clotarco: Horst R. Laubenthal
Idreno: Günter Reich

Cappella Coloniensis
Conductor: Ferdinand Leitner
Cologne
12 January 1968
Broadcast

Schumann: Das Paradies und die Peri

Gundula Janowitz
Luciana Ticinelli-Fattori
Julia Hamari
Anna De Luca
Ursula Boese
Lajos Kozma
Ennio Buoso
Lothar Ostenburg
Robert Amis El Hage

Orchestra Sinfonica e Coro di Milano della RAI
Conductor: Herbert Albert
RAI of Milano
27 January 1967
Broadcast

Other Janowitz performances I’ve made available include Eva in a Herbert von Karajan-led Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; Donna Elvira; the Countess in a superb Nozze di Figaro with Mirella Freni, Frederica von Stade, José van Dam, and Gabriel Bacquier; Marenka in The Bartered Bride; and Amelia in Simon Boccanegra co-starring Bruno Prevedi, Ingvar Wixell, and van Dam in a rare Fiesco.

Each Janowitz recording can be downloaded by clicking on the icon of a cloud with an arrow pointing downward on the audio player above and the resulting mp3 file will appear in your download directory.

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