Florence Austral - Ocean, thou mighty monster from Oberon (Weber)

[OpAus]

TransformingArt5 - it was written in English and first performed at Covent Garden. In this case the German is the later translation. Apart from this one instance, the 1930's was the end of the era when singers sang in the language in which they knew the work and there were cases of many languages used in the one perfomance. Austral and others belonged to English National Opera which wanted the English to understand what they were listening to.

[1920sbuff]

Excellent too although I slightly prefer Bindernagel.

[merrihew]

@1920sbuff I find that I have another version by Gadski which is pretty good which I'll post.

[1920sbuff]

@merrihew Looking forward to it.

[NEWbobofhollywood]

I find her intonation to be disagreeable.  Reminded me a bit of Florence Foster Jenkins.

[transformingArt]

Wonderful singing, but I wonder why most of English/Australian opera singers tend to sing in English, especially in 1920s. I have a CD of compilation of singers like Austral, Peter Dawson, and some others, and even they were capable of singing these with the original language, they always made recordings in English; I really wonder.

[65attila]

Magnificent performance by s soprano - not known enough. Thanks for posting.

John