Friday 7 January 2005

Carolyn Sampson really has a most lovely soprano voice. I first met her in a new Hyperion release (Handel's Ode to St Cecilia, and cantata Cecilia, volgi un sguardo). Then in a lovely BIS disc of two of Bach's best secular cantatas conducted by Suzuki and his Japanese consort: the "Coffee" cantata, and the ever-incredible O Holder Tag, erwünschte Zeit (where Sampson is so much better than Dorothea Röschman or Christine Schäfer).

Lovely sound, intelligent musicianship, vocal dexterity in abundance (and she certainly needs it in the Bach Wedding cantata). Only real drawback is she suffers from what I term the Joan Sutherland school of diction; it takes a good 30 minutes to work out what language she is singing in, let alone identifying individual words. Still, we can't expect everything.

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