Leontyne Price at The Met
2 Disc Set
In her two and a half decades at The Metropolitan Opera, soprano Leontyne Price brought vocal opulence and lyrical splendor to the heroines of Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini. The vast array of vocal colors she could employ are on full display in this double-disc set released by The Met in September 2020 in celebration of the ninety-four-year-old’s decades-long career there. The two-disc cd set features 34 live performances of Miss Price in some of her most shining vocal moments onstage at The Met, ranging from her 1961 debut as Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore to her opening of the new Met at Lincoln Center in 1966 as Cleopatra in Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, to her farewell performance as the title heroine in Verdi’s Aida in 1985. Leontyne Price was the first black major international artist with a career at The Met. Often coined a “pioneering barrier breaker”, Ms. Price’s long list of achievements include the President Medal of Freedom, an astonishing 18 Grammy awards, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. The Met’s engineers have done a fine job of remastering these tracks, but the limitations of recording technology run shy of truly capturing Price’s luminescent vocalism. The compilation does give a glimpse of what it must have been like to hear her live. The compilation fittingly closes with “O Patria mia” from her final Aida, a performance that received an equally thunderous ovation as her Metropolitan Opera debut 24 years earlier.
