GUNDULA JANOWITZ

Strauss Ariadne auf Naxos

Mozart Così fan tutte, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni

Verdi Don Carlo, Simon Boccanegra

Beethoven Fidelio

Weber Freischütz

Wagner Die Meistersinger

Monteverdi L'incoronazione di Poppea

Smetana Bartered Bride

Lucia Popp

Waldemar Kmentt

Franco Corelli

Chorus and Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera Live 1962-1990

Conductors: Bernstein, Böhm, Dohnányi, Karajan, Krips, Krombholc, Schønwandt, Stein

Gundula Janowitz was admired above all for the clarity of her timbre and her consistently clean intonation. It would be wrong, however to suggest that Gundula Janowitz's needle-sharp accuracy ever impeded her emotional and dramatic involvement in a role. Quite the opposite, in fact: the simplicity and nobility of her singing very much predestined her for the roles with which she was most closely associated: the Countess, Donna Anna and Donna Elvira, Elisabetta in Don Carlo and as Ariadne, the role in which she bade farewell to the operatic stage in 1990, by which date she had sung the part almost 50 times at the Vienna State Opera alone.

Janowitz began her career at the house three decades earlier, making her Bayreuth début as a Flower maiden in Parsifal at more or less the same time. Throughout this period she was encouraged by Herbert von Karajan, under whose guidance she advanced as far as she dared into heavier repertory, appearing as Wagner's Sieglinde and even as the Empress in Die Frau ohne Schatten. In the event, however, these roles, like that of Leonore, which she first sang in 1976, remained the exception to the rule. Instead, she exercised admirable self-restraint, limiting herself to the lyric soprano repertoire, although even here there were surprises including the curious arrangement of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea that Karajan conducted in Vienna in 1963.

Orfeo C731071B