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The Spanish soprano
Maria Galvany studied in Madrid and
made her debut in 1897 as Lucia di Lammermoor.
She had quite an extensive career on
discs and sang at a number of important
opera houses though never at the
most important. So no La Scala, no Covent
Garden and no Metropolitan. But elsewhere
she proved a draw being popular in Lisbon
and in smaller Italian houses and in
Nice. The noted biographer and operatic
historian the late Leo Riemens speculates
in his notes that it was odd that she
never won success on a bigger stage
but I think that the reasons are all
too clear from this extraordinary series
of discs made between 1906 and 1908.
Her great distinctiveness
is in her balletic, incendiary and incessantly
deployed machine gun staccato. It crops
up everywhere. Clearly it was something
of a trademark of hers and maybe expected
and has to be heard to be believed.
The technique here, and generally, is
certainly out of the ordinary but the
voice itself can be hard and metallic
and not especially attractive (try Una
voce poco fa). Not only is her vibrato
rather hard and fast but also the effect
of listening to so many canary-ish tricks
begins to grate. In fact hers is a voice
that when she hits the high E flat staccatos
(which she does with uncanny accuracy
let it be said) has been compared to
that of a whistling kettle. That’s not
unkind criticism, either.
The repertoire is essentially
Italian and the selections are enlivened
by some duets. It’s true that she did
made sides with such as de Lucia and
Ruffo – two stellar names in anyone’s
book – so she was clearly esteemed in
a number of quarters. Those discs have
been reissued often enough and only
one de Lucia is here – and they do give
some persuasive evidence that she could
scale down her bag of tricks when confronted
with a fellow artist of stature and
musical value. The piano-accompanied
Prendi, l´anel ti dono with de
Lucia demonstrates that the yielding
and elegant de Lucia had an entirely
beneficial effect on Galvany. Elsewhere
Giorgini, whilst by no means negligible,
proves rather more inert and lugubrious.
In fact some of her best, least affected
and mechanical, singing comes when she
joins a fellow Spaniard, de Segurola
for their extract from one of her great
showpiece works, Oh ciel, che tento
from La Sonnambula. Perhaps in the end
though, because more characteristic,
one should remember her by her Verdi
where the balance between attractive
phrasing and ridiculous roulades is
almost total.
Galvany died in obscurity
in Rio de Janeiro in 1949. It was a
sad end to what had once been a good
career. In the end she lacked the musical
instincts to take her to the top. Her
vocal pyrotechnics and staccato gunslinging
just didn’t pass muster even then and
when the technique went there must have
been little left. These discs, now almost
a century old have been vividly transferred.
There’s a deal of surface noise but
the ear adjusts quickly and in the circumstances
distractions have been excellently minimised.
They give renewed life to an important
voice in early recordings.
Jonathan Woolf