Recent Delos Releases

The just-released “Love Songs” (3029, CD) is among the triumphs of a catalogue that has been noteworthy in roughly equal parts for the meretricious, the marvelous and the simply quirky during its 15-year existence.

Soprano Arleen Auger and pianist Dalton Baldwin present a recital that is, in a word, perfection. Included are 25 wide-ranging yet, in many respects, complementary songs--many of them unfamiliar--dealing with matters of the heart: from Copland’s very early, very French-in-feeling “Pastorale,” to the Brazilian composer Jaime Ovalle’s exquisite “Azulao” (remembered as an encore on many a Gerard Souzay-Dalton Baldwin recital), songs by Joseph Marx, Oscar Straus, Stephen Foster, Frank Bridge, Noel Coward, Britten, Frederick Loewe and some Schumann, Richard Strauss and Mahler.

All of it is sung with flawless purity of tone--it is difficult to think of another voice with so little vibrato that can sound as womanly as Auger’s--pointed enunciation and the sort of simplicity that is denied to all but the most intelligent recitalists. Baldwin’s accompaniments are enhancing without being self-effacing, as one expects of this supremely sensitive artist.

In two additional new releases, Delos continues its showcasing of two otherwise neglected American orchestras. The Seattle Symphony under Gerard Schwarz presents its second Wagner program for the label--orchestral excerpts from “Der Fliegende Hollander,” “Lohengrin” and “Parsifal” (3053, CD), handsomely executed, idiomatically projected, although the massed violin sound is a mite on the thin side, particularly in the “Hollander” overture.

Still, the record offers further evidence to support the belief that Schwarz’s years with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra represented the efforts of a skillful big-orchestra conductor developing within the body and mind of a none-too-sympathetic small-orchestra conductor.

The Portland-based Oregon Symphony would not yet seem to be as cohesive a body as the Seattle orchestra, but under the expert guidance of conductor James DePreist in Rachmaninoff’s “The Sea and the Gulls” (3071, CD), it shows itself to be a serious body of players, capable of delivering on a high professional standard.

In response to the unasked question: “The Sea and the Gulls,” the only title to appear on the CD box’s spine and which hits you again in huge lettering (with appropriate avian-marine illustration) on the box front, is in fact an orchestration by Respighi of one of Rachmaninoff’s “Etudes-Tableaux” for piano, an eight-minute-long study in gorgeous-gloomy sensibility.

What would seem to be the filler, as indicated by type size, on this CD is the 52-minute-long Second Symphony of Rachmaninoff, in one of its most successful interpretations: energetically paced, sharply detailed, rhythmically taut, but not overly so. (The familiar “Vocalise” is thrown in for good measure, too.)

Fine recording. Curious marketing.