LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)

HIGH AND MIGHTY

How fortunate we are to have the brilliant Natalie Dessay ["Femme du Monde," Brian Kellow, April] on today's opera and concert scene: a high coloratura of nearly flawless precision and deep musicality with a visionary artistic mission that seeks to blast the boundaries of the songbird's usual Fach. Bravissima. How sad that an artist of her caliber can be so ungenerous toward one of her predecessors, the unique Mado Robin. When it comes to virtuoso challenges and vocal arabesques, Dessay can easily outmaneuver not only Robin but most other sopranos on the planet. And she can do it perched atop twenty-foot stilts, looking fabulous in Spandex.

What Dessay cannot do is match Robin's compelling verbal warmth, with its odd but haunting vocal timbre -- or that famous overtone-rich top register that still renders first-time hearers speechless. Listen to Robin in Benedict's "Carnival of Venice," with its pure, sweet tone, lustrous soft highs and jaw-dropping climatic B-flat above high C -- or even better, in Koechlin's evanescent, high-note-free "Si tu le veux" -- before dismissing Robin as all "high notes and nothing else."

While we're on high notes, and just for the record ["Trill-Seeker," Paul Thomason, April]: Zerbinetta's "Grossmachtige Prinzessin," original version, was impressively recorded in 1913 by Viennese soprano Hermine Bosetti and, although it contains a few mercy cuts in the fioriture, in 1951 by Ilse Hollweg for Decca [both out of print].

 
Brian Convery 
Philadelphia, PA 

BLURRED VISION

In his review of our Werther [May], BCS-0457, Eric Myers declares, "On the packaging, there is an apologia for the tape's visual quality, with dark stage lighting taking the blame. That's not the real problem. The fact is that this tape is a dupe, already numerous generations away from the original source." In short, Mr. Myers is asserting that we lied. He doesn't have a clue about what he's looking at. Our source tape was a high-resolution dub of a high-resolution original, recorded in the professional, Betacam format.