Pauline Viardot was the daughter of Manuel Garcia, Rossini's first Count Almaviva, and the younger sister of Maria Malibran whom Rossini thought unique as an interpreter of his music. Like Malibran, who died in 1836 after a riding accident during pregnancy, Pauline made her debut at the age of 17 as Desdemona in Rossini's Otello. That was in London (and later in Paris) in 1839. The following year, she married the French writer Louis Viardot, 21 years her senior, and thereafter became one of the central figures in the musical, literary and social life of her age. In 1883 she suffered a double bereavement. Viardot died, and so did the novelist Turgenev with whom Pauline had enjoyed an intimate friendship since they first met in Paris in November 1843. Pauline herself survived as a semi-recluse until 1910, dying in her eighty-ninth year as full of years as her elder sister had died bereft of them.
Pauline's talents were formidable, as a singer, as a pianist (she studied with Liszt and was admired by Chopin) and as a composer of occasional pieces in a remarkable array of styles. And it is Pauline Viardot-Garcia the composer that this record largely celebrates. There is, it is true, the occasional salon piece in the collection. But there is also folk-song, Spanish and Tyrolean, operatic scenas, dramatic songs, including one very much in the Erlkonig mould (more Loewe, it should be said, than Schubert) as well as a daunting array of transcriptions. These include Nicolo Jommelli's La calandrina, freely embellished; a virtuoso aria written by Gluck for the haute-contre specialist Legros inserted by Pauline into the version of Orphee prepared for her by Berlioz in 1859; and four bewitching songs based on Chopin mazurkas (Op. 50 Nos. 1 and 2, Op. 68 No. 2, and Op. 33 No. 2). Chopin purists will no doubt look askance, and silly, for Chopin so loved the settings he often accompanied Pauline when she performed them. It is interesting to speculate on whether or not Pauline would have attempted her grand Scene d'Hermione from Racine's Andromaque had Rossini's Ermione not, at that time, sunk without trace. In the event, it is a striking piano-accompanied scena rather after the manner of Rossini's Giovanna d'Arco.
The Swiss soprano Karin Ott is to be thanked and congratulated for her efforts on behalf of Pauline, as is the pianist Christoph Keller. It isn't always easy to accompany songs written by a woman who is determined to show off her Lisztian pedigree or her kinship with Chopin. It has to be said, though, that Karin Ott is greatly to be preferred as a purveyor of Pauline's music than as a possible re-creator of her vocal craft. The Jommelli and the Gluck call out for someone like Sutherland in her prime; and Ott, with her bright but occasionally rather pinched and monochrome sound, is not that. She is not a great bravura singer. Elsewhere the lack of tonal shading can be a problem, but in most of the songs and scenas it would be churlish to complain. Without Ott's efforts we would not be hearing them at all, and the Chopin songs, for example, are entrancingly done.
CPO provide a handsome small booklet to go with the CD. It has texts, translations and notes, though for some reason they are all in separate sections. (Hyperion's booklets are a model that might well be looked at in this respect.) But at least the texts are there which is not always the case with releases from some of the smaller continental companies.'