Celebration of a great mezzo: Rita Gorr.

I often listen to her voice. I always have done. Perhaps because I discovered this artist almost at the same time as I started to appreciate voices by myself, comparing with what I could hear at home from a coloratura and a baritone'Martin'(named after a singer whose voice was able to reach higher notes than an ordinary baritone, I have also seen it called a kind of 'lazy' tenor...).
So, my favourite voice became what I have always liked to think of as a 'cello-voice'. Madame Rita Gorr will remain my favourite mezzo, and I am trying to increase the missing links in my collection of her great roles. Unfortunately, she did not record everything she sang. I still have discoveries to make, from live recordings in the USA,(Opera depot) and also from her Wagner performances in Bayreuth.

I have the live recording of Lohengrin where she was an outstanding Ortrud. (orfeo1959). There are more recordings of this period and I plan to enlarge my knowlegde of her repertoire.

I hardly ever saw her on stage. She took part in a gala concert in Marseille Opera House and sang Samson et Dalila arias alongside José Luccioni and Adrien Legros. I was under the charm of these amazing voices and intense dramatic presence: these memories became family stories and now I even think they belong to our family legend of opera, and I am the only survivor...

I would never even have dreamed of travelling to Paris in those days. I had my share of opera singing at home and at Marseille Opera House (the programmes were richer than today... One day I will list the operas I am sure that I heard because my father took part in them... it is amazing compared with our current six productions a year).

In the early sixties Rita Gorr became the first on my Treasure Island with the LP of French opera arias, including Gluck 'Divinités du Styx' which I adored!
It meant I would play it nearly non-stop, especially on Sundays, having to be careful not to scratch the record.

Finaly, I was able to sing along with her, as my rather low singing voice was naturally in tune with hers! The image of the artist was not a problem in those days. I think that opera lovers with limited budget, which was our case, used to listen to radio broadcasts. Operas from Opera Garnier were broadcast, and new records when they came out were criticised, analysed, on the radio on Sunday afternoons by a famous team of reviewers around Jacques Bourgeois.

Only Rita's voice and its inflexions plus the knowledge of the story mattered to me and she sounded so powerful and moving, either with strong, martial accents or sorrowful, desparate ones.

Her rich voice, equally at ease at the top and low range, always puts the right weight on words. She belonged to the old school of singing, which is really concerned with the utterance of sung words. She was Belgian, therefore was a beautiful French speaker. I am sure the young generation of singers will listen to her renditions carefully and learn a lot about the French repertoire: Massenet, Gounod, Lalo, Saint-Saëns and Poulenc, where she illustrates the main mezzo roles. She also sang in German and was the first non native-speaking German mezzo to take part in the Wagner operas in Bayreuth. (Italian too of course).

I went to Brussels at the beginning of September to attend Médée.(Cherubini) For quite a while now I have spent my leisure time on the net; I only knew this aria sung by Rita Gorr from this opera. (I am borrowing this extract from the uploader RITA GORR , and I am very grateful to be able to use it to celebrate this great mezzo, here showing how overwhelming and tragic her voice could be. She was my discovery of Charlotte and Amnéris. And then came 'Les dialogues des Carmélites' with her stunning Marie. I will spend more time listening to her Wagner renditions which I do not know very well, apart from Lohengrin.
I keep her on my Treasure Island even more today.


Rita Gorr is celebrated on internet here:
WIKI
last year 'Happy birthday'from Opera Fresh.

youtube channels illustrating the love of her art of singing among passionate uploaders:
LyricXIII Lied Von Erdre Gustav Malher.
Classicvynilbiz: wonderful work on the major arias.
Major link too: Cantabile -Subito

The News from Belgium, in French LINK
Le Soir: LINK