Lucia Popp recorded everything well. That is not faint praise — it is simply the truth, and the truth is worth stating plainly before anything else. In a career that moved from Mozart ingénues to the deep Straussian heroines of her final years, she never coasted, never phoned it in, never let routine dull the edge of that extraordinary instrument. So even a disc that the label has packaged with what can only be called magnificent indifference to its own commercial prospects deserves serious attention when her name is on it.
The program here is a curious but not illogical anthology: Telemann, Handel twice over — once from Samson, once from Messiah — and Bach, including the great cantata BWV 51, which remains one of the most demanding soprano showpieces the Baroque left us. What unifies the program isn’t the composers but the trumpet, which appears in every work. Carole Dawn Reinhart is the thread running through the whole enterprise, and she plays with a silvery, focused tone that never bullies its way past the voices.
The Bach is where you come for Popp and where you stay. “Großer Herr, o starker König” from the Christmas Oratorio is the kind of aria that can sound merely strenuous — all those leaping intervals, that relentless trumpet obbligato — but Popp makes it sound inevitable, even easy, which is of course the hardest thing of all. Her bright, centered soprano carries an almost physical sense of pleasure in the work; you can hear her leaning into the ornaments. And in BWV 51 — “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen,” which at just under eighteen minutes constitutes the disc’s substantial center of gravity — she is simply magnificent. The final “Alleluja” is a virtuoso obstacle course, and she navigates it with the kind of bright-eyed confidence that makes you forget there’s any obstacle at all.
Jorma Hynninen joins her in the Telemann and in the Handel excerpts. His voice at this period — this was recorded in 1979 — had a clarity and a lighter weight that suited the Baroque idiom rather well; the darker, more baritonal color he developed later would have been less idiomatic here. In the Telemann Psalm setting, a compact gem that doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves, Hynninen’s contribution is genuinely fine — well-shaped, cleanly focused, with real feeling for the text. His “The Trumpet Shall Sound” — given here, like the Handel soprano aria, in its German dress — is lithe and well-sung but ultimately a little underlit. The aria wants grandeur, a sense of eschatological inevitability. Hynninen delivers handsomeness where one hopes for awe.
The Amsterdamer Kammerorchester under Marius Voorberg plays with the kind of neat, light-footed efficiency you’d call historically informed if it weren’t done on modern instruments — period-adjacent, one might say, rather than period. The articulation is clean, the textures transparent enough to let the voices breathe. Nothing startles or provokes. Against the recordings that were already beginning to emerge from Christopher Hogwood, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and their contemporaries — recordings that were genuinely rethinking the sound world of this repertoire — Voorberg’s approach sounds like a civilized compromise. Not wrong, exactly. Just not adventurous.
The production situation is, not to put too fine a point on it, a mess. No texts, thin playing time, pricing that defies logic — these are real problems for anyone approaching this cold. And the fact that much of this material appears in a larger Popp compilation, available for substantially less money, makes the single-disc proposition hard to defend on purely economic grounds. The one thing this release has that the compilation doesn’t is Hynninen’s bass aria in the Telemann — a small but genuine loss if you choose the bigger set.
But here’s what matters: the singing is wonderful. Popp at her peak was one of those rare artists for whom joy was not a reading but a condition — you hear it in the way she attacks a phrase, in the warmth she brings to a sustained note, in the tiny expressive inflections that make familiar music feel newly minted. That quality is fully present here. Whatever the label’s failings, the music-making survives them. Seek it out accordingly.
