MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Regine Crespini - The Very Best Of Regine Crespini

Régine Crespin was unquestionably one of the great sopranos of the twentieth century, although her career was marked by periods of struggle with her instrument. EMI's The Very Best of Régine Crespin is concentrated in the years 1958-1961, when Crespin enjoyed her first bloom of international fame, and in 1965, when she was locked into her first vocal crisis, something that would be apparent in her San Francisco debut the following year. Thus, the fare here ranges from radiant to struggling; she is radiant in the Rossini Guilluame Tell aria from Act III, "Sombre forêt," and struggling in the excerpts from Berlioz's Les Troyens from 1965; startling, as her most famous recording -- that of Berlioz's Les nuits d'eté for Decca in 1963 -- was made only two years earlier. While this compilation -- weighted toward French opera and song in the first disc and German in the second, with Italian songs and arias included at both ends of the package -- contains many very good things, and as a whole, it cannot be said to represent Crespin at her very best. That said, her turn alongside Rita Gorr in Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites represents a genuinely memorable 10 minutes on this disc, and there are other things that do work as well. The print in the booklet is tiny and consists of mostly orange type on an almost brown maroon, rendering most of the text barely possible to read. (AllMusic)