There are quite a number
of Anderson recordings currently available
and most take the route of a broad overview
of her career. This is a relatively
tempting target because she sang lieder
and opera, spirituals and oratorio and
in a disc of twenty items one can cover
a lot of stylistic ground. One can even,
as Symposium does, trace her from the
later acoustics of December 1923 to
the post-War Schubert lieder sides made
in New York. Naxos is currently engaged
on a retrospective that does something
of the same thing but Symposium’s disc
has rarer material and is geared to
a more High Art audience. That’s not
to deny the Spirituals inheritance,
as the first four tracks are her spiritual
discs of 1923, ‘24 and 1930. But we
do get a slew of her Schubert, rare
1946 Bach and some Handel as well as
one example of her Sibelius recordings.
So this is a well-rounded
portrait that is likely to offer something
new to all but the hardened Anderson
completist. Comparing the five items
that overlap between this Symposium
and the most recent Naxos issue – Sometimes
I Feel like A Motherless Child, Heav’n
Heav’n, the Donizetti, Debussy and Tchaikovsky
one finds that Symposium has retained
a relatively high level of surface noise.
Naxos has used a degree of noise reduction
to filter out the shellac rustle. The
voice is therefore that much more immediate
in the Symposium transfers without having
at all been artificially projected.
The down side is the shellac crackle.
The spirituals are wonderfully and famously
vibrant and the advantage here is that
the two acoustics will be less well
known than the sequence she made around
1930. Her Donizetti is rather under
characterised. Of her Handel, this is
a revealing selection. She has a certain
static nobility in the Te Deum whilst
in her aria from L’Allegro she goes
high without apparent discomfort – taking
the highest notes with real ease.
Her Ave Maria is rather
too reverential but the post War lieder
discs show a deepening cultivation and
emotive resonance, even if her tone
is not flattered by the slightly metallic
recording of Thekla. Her Bach
comes with obbligato oboe played by
Robert Bloom and an ensemble directed
by Robert Shaw. It’s a convincing performance
as well. It’s a pity that the Sibelius
disc is somewhat scuffy because the
series of discs she recorded (five songs
I believe) represented an interesting
example of the extent of her song repertory.
Given the attractive
notes and the wide-ranging conspectus
it is really a question of duplication
and transfer imperatives. Given those
two factors you may well want to investigate
the more esoteric fringes of her repertoire
in this well constructed and programmed
disc.
Jonathan Woolf
for details
Marian Anderson (contralto) 
