Word: degaetani
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Schoenberg would have had few complaints about Jan DeGaetani, the mezzo-soprano whose recording of his Book of the Hanging Gardens was just released on Nonesuch...
...DeGaetani has made a big reputation singing contemporary works partly because of her uncanny ability to navigate faultlessly among unconventional rhythms and unexpected pitch relations. That ability is very much in evidence on this recording as is a comfortable, idiomatic approach to the music. She gives subtle shape to Schoenberg's disoriented vocal lines...
...DeGaetani's tone in her low register has an eerie, mysterious quality which reflects the ambiguous and sinister tests by Stefan George. Her upper register however is just plain ugly. When she goes above the staff, she sounds as if she were struggling to free herself from someone clutching at her throat. Fortunately, she doesn't have to go there too often and her performance remains sensitive and dramatic if not always beautiful...
Songs by Stephen Foster (Mezzo-Soprano Jan DeGaetani, Baritone Leslie Guinn, Pianist Gilbert Kalish; Nonesuch, $2.98). One of the prime movers in the Scott Joplin revival, Nonesuch now appears to be trying the same trick for the composer of Old Black Joe and Old Folks at Home. The company deserves to succeed. Foster (1826-64) was America's first great songwriter, and there is much more in his song bag than just the minstrel ballads with Uncle Tomish lyrics by which he is usually remembered. There is, for example, the sprightly If You've Only Got a Moustache...