Arrivals from Naxos are making themselves most welcome, and not merely for the super-bargain price. A few months ago we had the delightfully fresh voice and art of the Maltese soprano Miriam Gauci in her Italian opera recital (11/92), and now this excellent soprano leggiero from Bratislava, equally fresh and pellucid in tone, and with perhaps a more marked individuality of both timbre and expression.
Though she sings in the pure lyric repertoire crossing with the parts that used to be regarded as being reserved for 'coloratura' specialists, she has a certain nobility and breadth of tone that listeners will catch immediately in the opening of the aria from I puritani. She is no tweeter, and no copier either: no traces of Callas or Sutherland are to be detected in her way with the ''Care campagne'' passage in the Sonnambula excerpt or in the start of Lucia's Mad scene. She is admirably graceful in fioritura, highly accomplished in scale-work, and able to take her top notes without hardening or shrillness. Her dramatic gifts may be less certain: reviewing the Boheme in which Orgonasova sings Mimi (Naxos 4/91), MEO found ''her only real flaw'' to be ''a slight reluctance to use her words expressively''. Here I would say that applies to the Rigoletto aria, ''Tutte le feste'', which she seems not to imagine in dramatic context, yet elsewhere, in the Mad scene and in the solo from I Capuletti e i Montecchi, she is far from inert in articulation and her restrained manner does not preclude pathos.
A valuable contribution is also made by conductor and orchestra, who practise the art of accompaniment, with an idiomatic feeling for rubato without slackness.'