Featured Artist: Caballe

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MONTSERRAT

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CABALLÉ

AN APPRECIATION

Montserrat Caballé was born in 1933 and studied music at the Barcelona Liceu Conservatorio.
She then put in gruelling apprenticeship years at the opera houses in Basel and Bremen.
After a successful recital tour of Central America in 1963, she met and married tenor Bernabé Marti. Soon she made her opera debut in Mexico City as Manon,
opposite Giuseppe di Stefano. Her success was so great that contracts in Philadelphia and Dallas in 1965 soon followed.

Then in April, 1965 she stepped in for an ailing singer to sing the role of Lucrezia Borgia with the American Opera Society in Carnegie Hall and the rest is history. She had arrived !

In recital, Caballé's personal charm and humour found an appropriate platform.
In 1974 she gave a recital at the Royal Festival Hall and as an encore sang a Swiss folk song "G'Schätzli".
Quite seriously, she said that she was going to do a tribute to a very great singer and then gave a wonderful and absolutely hysterical send-up of Schwarzkopf's way of singing. This so disturbed a London critic that he vowed not to attend any further Caballé performances.
(This event can be heard on CA151)

In opera, Caballé was in a league of her own. She could bind together a phrase or add a swell to a note at just the right point which made it individual and of course there was that trademark pianissimo which no other singer seems to have been able to quite achieve.
Montserrat Caballé remains one of the outstanding singers of the operatic stage.