Isabel Bayrakdarian: La Zingarella: Through Romany Songland
Avie Records

The wealth of life experiences soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian has enjoyed is reflected in the wide range of her recordings, the latest of which takes listeners on a scenic tour of gypsy-inspired songs and arias. La Zingarella: Through Romany Songland is as rewarding a collection as those she's issued previously, though the primary reason for it has less to do with the music she's chosen, as wonderful as it is, than her voice, bewitching as ever. Take any of the twenty-seven songs on the sixty-seven-minute set and without exception each will command attention for the sheer beauty of the vocal delivery. As much as the music, in her words, “transcends geography” in giving expression to our shared humanity, it's her voice that's ultimately the greatest connecting thread.

As a Lebanon-born Armenian who's lived in Canada and now southern California, Bayrakdarian's naturally comfortable inhabiting different milieus; the four-time Juno Award winner has sung with many of the world's most renowned orchestras and opera companies, and it's her voice you hear on the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. She's a teacher too, at the University of California Santa Barbara where she holds the title of Full Professor, Director of Opera Theatre, and is Head of the Voice Area in the Music Department. That said, she seems especially comfortable with this programme. In fashioning the set-list, she sought out art songs that draw on Romani melodies and was amazed by what she uncovered. She was familiar with many of the pieces, including those by Brahms, Dvorak, and Bizet, but not, for instance, French composer Maurice Yvain's “La Zingarella,” an irresistible charmer that so enamoured her she chose it for the album title.

Her collaborators on the project are also critical to its success. Violinist Mark Fewer, violist Juan-Miguel Hernandez, and the Gryphon Trio (violinist Annalee Patipatanakoon, cellist Roman Borys, and pianist Jamie Parker) are celebrated artists in their own right, and the arrangements for every song but one on the recording are new ones by Peter Tiefenbach or John Greer. Restricting the songs to a modicum of elements proved a particularly inspired decision as the instruments beautifully enhance the singing without overpowering it. That's evident immediately when Tiefenbach's setting of Liszt's “Die drei Zigeuner” features Bayrakdarian's vocal accompanied by Parker and Fewer only, both of who support the singer magnificently. Here and in the songs that follow, one is awed by her unerring vocal control and command of phrasing, vibrato, and dynamics (consider her treatments of Dvorak's “A les je tichy kolem kol,” Joaquín Valverde's “Clavelitos,” and Emmerich Kálmán's “Heia, heia, in den Bergen” three examples of many).

After essaying the eight short pieces in Brahms's Zigeunerlieder Op. 103 with aplomb, she turns her attention to the seven in Dvorak's Ciganske melodie Op. 55, Parker and Fewer again her sole accompanists. Three songs by Sebastian Iradier are included, with the impishly endearing “Juanita o la perla de Aragon” and enchanting “La Perla de Triana” joined by the alluring “El arreglito,” the Habanera that inspired Bizet's famous one in Carmen and which appears here also. At album's end, Bayrakdarian's rapturous delivery of Victor Herbert's “Gypsy Love Song” from the operetta The Fortune Teller is also striking for being sung in English.

August 2022