Jessye Norman records add to legendary diva’s legacy

Three unreleased albums by the late great US soprano Jessye Norman will help swell her magnificent legacy.

Jessye Norman The Unreleased Masters set has been brought out by the Decca label.

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Christmas came late for this reviewer when a three-disc set of never previously released recordings of the US soprano Jessye Norman dropped into my inbox.

The singer, who died in 2019, never sang the role of Isolde in Wagner’s great romantic tragedy Tristan and Isolde, but she did record some excerpts with Kurt Masur and the Gewandhausorchester in 1998. However, she refused to allow the release of the hour-long highlights which also feature American-Austrian tenor Thomas Moser, German mezzo Hannah Schwartz and a young English tenor Ian Bostridge.

Norman worried about undertaking the role, fearing that her voice would not be able to sustain its full power and majesty after the opera’s massive first act, and you can occasionally hear that some passages are a stretch for her. This doesn’t detract from the overall impression, however, and we are left to wonder how a full performance would have rated compared with, say, Birgitt Nilsson or Nina Stemme.

Album artwork for Decca's Jessye Norman The Unreleased Masters set.

The second disc in the set The Unreleased Masters is the gem of the three. It features a live performance of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by James Levine, paired with Wagner’s five Wesendonck songs. Norman’s studio recording with Masur in 1982 is one of the greatest classical music albums of all time and the diva must have worried about comparisons being made with this concert performance in Berlin.

To most people’s ears she shouldn’t have had any qualms. As it is this is a glorious set to have alongside the original, and the Wesendonck songs are superlative.

Three heroines feature in the final disc – Berenice, Cleopatra and Phaedra – in works which exploit the soprano’s full versatility, from the elegant classicism of Haydn to the rich French romance of Berlioz, finishing with the angular and disturbing soundscape of Benjamin Britten’s Cantata.

Seiji Ozawa conducts the Boston Symphony on this recording. The perfectionist Norman withheld her approval for release because she was unhappy with the mix on Berlioz’s five-part Cleopatre: Scene Lyrique. This has subsequently been edited and cleaned up, and we should be grateful that Universal Music has finally released these recordings to help swell the enormous legacy of one of the greatest singers of the 20th century.

Jessye Norman The Unreleased Masters is available for $49.99 at classicsdirect.com.au or at the usual download and streaming sites.