Eleanor Steber: Distinctive, Dazzling Across Decades : RECORD REVIEWS

ELEANOR STEBER: Her First Recordings (1940). Various other singers; orchestra and chorus, Wilfrid Pelletier, cond. VAIA 1023.

ELEANOR STEBER SINGS RICHARD STRAUSS. Various other singers; orchestra, Karl Bohm and James Levine, cond. VAIA 1012.

ELEANOR STEBER IN CONCERT (1946-1958). Edwin Biltcliffe, piano. VAIA 1005-2.

Steber’s participation in the famous “No Name” recordings of 1940 (they were part of a newspaper promotion gimmick where no label credits were given) are especially welcome since they emphasize repertory that played no significant part in her stage career in subsequent decades--”Butterfly,” “Boheme” and “Faust.” What these excerpts reveal is a youthful, limpid, silvery soprano, perfectly placed, and a technique that was nearly faultless.

Her sound was never ideally Puccini-esque in voluptuousness, but she is really dazzling in Butterfly’s entrance aria, which she caps with an effortless D-flat. Both the “Boheme” and “Faust” excerpts are notable for some arching phrases, not to mention exquisite pianissimos and diminuendos.

It is revelation time on the Strauss disc. From a Vienna (not Munich as the notes state) broadcast of 40 minutes of “Frau ohne Schatten” in 1953, the soprano is heard as the Kaiserin, a role she never sang onstage. Her gleaming top tones deal with the treacherous tessitura with easy abandon. Steber never got much better than this. Unfortunately, the Four Last Songs, dating from 1970, show a sadly frayed voice, a shadow of its once-great self.

In the concerts discs, there are excerpts from a 1956 appearance distinguished by some seamless, haunting tone in Lieder, as well as three “Auvergne” songs that in their simplicity make one wish for more. Menotti’s “Telephone” aria is High Camp, her only lapse in taste.

In the 1958 Carnegie Hall circus, she seemed to sing just about everything she had ever heard, or at least learned. If there were vocal faults (the trills are not as neat at the end of this performance as at the beginning; sometimes she makes breathing miscalculations), they seem the result of over-enthusiasm rather than technical lapses. Amazing in every way is her arrangement of two scenes from “Frau,” in which she sings not only the Kaiserin, but also the Falcon, the Guardian and the Amme and gives each a distinctive vocal color.