Christine Brewer is best known for her towering assumptions of Wagner and Richard Strauss’s most dramatic heroines. This charming new release by Hyperion finds the American soprano in a more intimate mode, however, paying tribute to the art of the recital encore as perfected by some of Brewer’s grandest predecessors – Kirsten Flagstad, Eileen Farrell, Helen Traubel and Eleanor Steber. Inspired by her teacher, who had heard all these ladies in recital and collected their encores, Brewer brings warmth and affection to this varied selection of final flourishes.

These songs, with their sentimental lyrics and often predictable musical forms (you’ll see the crescendi coming a mile off), might be an acquired taste for some, but for others they’ll be heartwarmingly familiar, and Brewer’s golden soprano and good humour should be difficult for even hardened cynics to resist. A program like this risks being too much of a good thing – there’s a reason, after all, that these songs were used as encores and not core repertoire – but the innate heft of Brewer’s voice more or less counterbalances the repertoire’s most sugary excesses, and the selection strikes a balance between showpieces and simple ballads.

Roger Vignoles enters wonderfully into the spirit of the recital, matching both the personability and the opulence of Brewer’s renditions in his own effervescent playing. Fittingly, this treasury of other sopranos’ encores ends with one of Brewer’s own, Celius Dougherty’s very funny Review, whose words will be all too familiar to any habitué of the soprano recital. It’s the ideal finishing touch to this lovely collection.

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