GREAT RECORDINGS phase 19

MOZART
Sacred & Operatic Arias

Lucia Popp

5 09680 2 (D&T)
5 09656 2 (Angel)

Stereo
DDD
Recorded 1983
1:16:54 (1CD)

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‘Lucia Popp was everyone’s favourite’, begins John Steane’s characteristically elegant and informed essay. Indeed, her early death in 1993 was felt by many as a personal loss.

This disc marries a Mozart recital LP that enjoyed great success on its release in 1983 with three sacred items from a 1967 disc of Handel and Mozart, her first solo recording.

Popp had made her record debut three years earlier for EMI, as the Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte under Otto Klemperer. Of that famous assumption, Steane notes her singing was ‘fresh in tone and clean in style, radiated light...a spiky, elfin brilliance.’ Here we have such gems as Fiordiligi’s ‘Come scoglio’, heroic in mood, the singer’s grace and agility matched by power and fullness; and Susanna’s ‘Deh, vieni, non tardar’, which the original Gramophone review described simply as ‘hers by nature’.