# Second Round: Care Selve. Auger and Quartararo



## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

Artist: Arleen Auger Conductor: Gerard Schwarz Orchestra: Mostly Mozart Orchestra Composer: George Frideric Handel 
httGeorg Friedrich Händel - ATLANTA "




*Florence Quartararo, "Care Selve" Atalanta*
More on Florence:Florence Quartararo: A Great Singer Forgotten


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## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

Auger is lovely and wonderfully poised, but Quartararo's voice is just so arrestingly beautiful that she easily gets my vote.


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## MAS (Apr 15, 2015)

It might’ve been two different pieces of music, one very plain (as in simple rather than unprepossessing) and old-fashioned, the other decorated - I suspect the decorated one is not the original - but tastefully so. Not sure if it was the singer’s or the conductor’s decorations.

I love both of these singers, having admired Arleen Auger for a long time for her utter naturalness in singing, the voice emitted effortlessly and the tone unfailingly beautiful, limpid, and complemented by her use of the words. 

I know of Florence Quartararo’s version thanks to a YouTube recommendation on another singer’s video of the piece, and it was a revelation. The voice high and silvery, all of a piece, with an appealing quick vibrato, used with intelligence as well as integrity. The tempo is slow in the old school manner, but with which Quartararo copes admirably - it left me breathless.

I wish I could vote for both!


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## Viardots (Oct 4, 2014)

Quartararo is one of those "might have been" artists. Had Edward Johnson and Rudolf Bing taken her more seriously and had she not married the tyrannical Italo Tajo (who forbade her from continuing her career after their marriage), she would have become a leading lyric-dramatic soprano at the Met with a career comparable to that of Eleanor Steber at least, and probably also enjoyed a lucrative recording career. I remember when this recording of her "Care selve" was first uploaded to YouTube in 2010 (by another YouTube user) it created an instant sensation among viewers. Lots of listeners were astonished by the sheer beauty, warmth of feeling and musicality of her singing and wondered who this Florence Quartararo was, whom they had never heard of. Consequently there was a resurgence of interest in her and the Immortal Performances label caught the wind of it and gathered and released in 2013 her commercial and radio broadcast recordings and the sole Met broadcast of a complete opera with her in a leading role: a 1948 _Pagliacci_. 






Immortal Performances


Purchase all IPRMS CDs Here!



immortalperformances.org








Just as another subscriber has put it, had Quartararo, instead of the dire Delia Rigal, been chosen to sing Regina Elisabetta in the performance of _Don Carlo _(with Björling) that inaugurated Rudolf Bing's leadership at the Met in 1950.......


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

_Care selve, ombre beate, vengo in traccia del mio cor!_

"Dear woods, shadows blessed, I come in search of my beloved!"

Simpliciy, tenderness and fervor are needed, and Quartararo supplies them with a distinctive voice of great warmth and purity. Hers is one of my two favorite renderings (Eide Norena's is the other). Auger is hardly chopped liver, and it's nice to hear Handel's original scoring, along with some apt embellishment. But Quartararo is a marvel.


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## BBSVK (10 mo ago)

I go for the otherwordly quality, something like Alma Gluck from the first round. I suspect it is not what the aria is supposed to be about, but I continue not checking the libretto for this one. So my choice is Auger. Maybe there is some stupid prosaic reason, was she recorded from more afar ? Tell me if you know. But there was the magic I was looking for.


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