Product Details

• Released on: 2000-01-01
• Number of discs: 2
• Format: Import
• Running time: 156 minutes

Customer Reviews

A magnificent collection
Warren was a superstar. His voice of supreme power and lovely sound was so versatile. He could sing Verdi like Verdi always wished his wonderful music to be sung and he could sing American songs with the patriotic passion they should convey. This collection is magnificent.

One of the Richest High Baritones of the Century...
Leonard Warren possessed an unusual voice; a lyric baritone with the fullness of a powerful basso cantante. His high notes traveled into the upper baritone stratosphere, with a beauty matched to my ears only by Riccardo Stracciari... and he sang them with an ease most tenors can only envy. (And I love the tenor voice, don't make any mistake about that!) Listening to this two CD set brought one thing forth to my mind- Leonard Warren flat out enjoyed singing and he enjoyed spreading that fabulous feeling far and wide.
Listen to his renditions of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the four sea shanties gracing this disc, and America the Beautiful. How many singers have ever rendered these old songs with such enthusiasm and beauty? To my ears, few can compare. A Little Bit of Heaven is a charming little piece of nostalgia for old Ireland, with perfectly placed high notes that provide a baritone counterpoint to the marvelous Scottish and Irish tenors that have graced our ears throughout this century. The sound on most of the songs is clear, showing off Warren's voice to his and the listeners' advantage.
Now we come to the opera arias and there's a rich assortment on display here. The Gounod Faust aria is from a rare Russian concert recording and is gorgeous, though it's accompanied by a piano. (Nothing against pianos, but I wanted the full orchestra. On other selections in the songs CD, the piano works superbly. Just a matter of personal taste.) The classic Scintille Diamant from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman shows off his upper range, as he hits the high G-sharps with authority and ease. One of my favorites is the great aria from Verdi's MacBeth, in which Warren gets it all together. MacBeth's humanity is rarely on display in this version of the drama, but here it is in spades, along with his arrogance, fear, and anger at being attacked. "Birnam Wood on the march indeed!" The ease and fullness of the high notes, which are all in service to one of Warren's greatest characterizations, are a wonder.
Don't get the idea that only his high notes sounded good, or that Warren was a bellowing beast. He floated a pillowy pianissimo that has to be heard to be believed. The only other baritone voice that compares in this respect, of those whom I have heard, is Cornell MacNeil. I regret that there seems to be no great baritone duets these two great singers could have engaged in, like Verdi provided for bassos in Don Carlos. Does anyone out there remember either of the two great performances by Ghiaurov and Talvela of the King Philip/Grand Inquisitor duets under either Stein or Solti?
Back to Leonard Warren...
In terms of sound on the opera selections, the later, the better, though most of the pieces sound fine. I must agree a bit with an earlier reviewer in the case of Il Balen, from Verdi's Il Trovatore. The sound is fuzzy, bloated, and unclear, at least on my machine... but most all the others sound fine on the same machine. What happened? I had several versions of this great aria on LP, and I do remember one of them being well below the sonic standard of any of the others. The version on the old Cellini conducted complete recording with Bjoerling and Milanov sounded fine, as did the version he recorded with Leontyne Price and Richard Tucker. Why have this one, which does a disservice to the singer and the CD as a whole? And where is his incredible Per me ora fatale from the same opera? Even hearing a badly recorded version of Leonard Warren performing this aria would be a thrill. His singing of Il Balen is excellent- it just sounds foggy. Except for that, I would recommend this set to anyone interested in Warren's singing who might not have many of these recordings on CD. If you have virtually all of them, why bother with this set... unless there's a song you just cannot live without?
The Otello excerpts are exceptional, and there's the treats of his Nemico della patria (Andrea Chenier by Giordano) and Di Provenza (La Traviata) which are my favorite versions of these arias.
To those who might love the singing of Sherrill Milnes and Thomas Hampson, Leonard Warren should be heard and savored for what he was: an American original we can all be proud of.

Good collection, but expected more . . .
I could not wait for this collection when I first heard that the Leonard Warren Foundation was releasing it. Now that I have listened to it, I still think it is good, but the quality is just not the best. Maybe the age of the original recordings has something to do with the grainy sounds, but with today's technology it would seem that the sound quality would have been better. I still think Leonard Warren is the best baritone of this age (with Bryn Terfel running second). I will try to ignore the quality of the sound and concentrate on Warren's talent.