Victoria Song

Victoria de los Angeles was one of the finest lyric sopranos in the decades after World War II. She was born Victoria Gómez Cima. She learned to sing and play piano and guitar while still in school. She entered the Conservatorio de Liceo in Barcelona to study piano and singing, completing the six-year program in three, and graduating with full honors at the age of 18. Her membership in the Conservatory's Ars Musicae gave her wide exposure to the art song repertory and Baroque and Renaissance music.

Natalie Labourdette (soprano) and Victoria Guerrero (piano) make up an internationally award-winning art song duo that has released its debut CD on GENUIN. The tracklist includes 20th-century vocal music based around the experience of "la petite mort", as the French language refers to the climax of lovemaking. This is an existential experience, the desire to "linger", deep loneliness, and happy union! Alban Berg, Gabriel Faur, Samuel Barber, and other great composers of classical modernism created miniature masterpieces and the two young musicians dedicate themselves to this repertoire with a great sense of tonal color and interpretive clarity!

While most classical composers attempt to spread around their artistry among various mediums, Stephen Scott has put all of his eggs into the proverbial one basket, specializing in bowed piano music as founder/leader of the Bowed Piano Ensemble, est. 1977. This is not as limited a resource as it sounds; in 1930, Henry Cowell stated he had discovered 165 ways to play the inside of a piano, though if he made a list of all those methods no one has been able to find it. Moreover, Stephen Scott doesn't seem to mind being regarded as "the Bowed Piano Guy." New Albion's The Deep Spaces is his sixth bowed piano CD and demonstrates some measure of stepping out of the box on Scott's part; The Deep Spaces is a song cycle, set to poems by Shelley, Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Pliny, and Pablo Medina and sung by soprano Victoria Hansen.

Nothing could be more appropriate in celebrating Victoria de los Angeles’s 75th birthday than this extensive conspectus of her recordings of Spanish song over 40 years. It’s hardly possible in a brief review to do justice to such an astonishing achievement on the part of the Spanish soprano; indeed had she sung nothing else her place in recorded history would be assured.