Music for a While (DG)
The soprano Anne Sofie von Otter clearly loves a challenge. A year or two ago she mastered Offenbach’s arias with ease. Here she is tackling something that needs virtuosity of a different kind.
Baroque vocal music aims to wring the maximum expression from the words, so the singer has to be able to summon a myriad different colours, as well as handle those trembling vocal ornaments; all of which von Otter does with conviction. The first song is a tour de force, a disquisition on the agonies of love expressed in six verses. Von Otter finds a different tone for every one and still sound natural. In the next song she finds another tone, of tremulous beauty. And when she wants to she can be tellingly simple, as in the wonderful lullaby from Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea. The English songs by Purcell are equally fine, but the melancholy of Dowland’s lute songs is one tone that escapes von Otter. Alongside her are a group of excellent Swedish musicians, including Jakob Lindberg.
Ivan Hewett