Sylvia's Reviews!

Here is a collection of excerpts from reviews of Sylvia Sass. After each review, I have included the role, opera, and house where it was sung.


1975 - "Her performances of the Willow Song and Ave Maria have not been bettered in my experience since the young Tebaldi first came with the Scala company to Covent Garden twenty-five years ago. Miss Sass is surely destined for a great career." (Desdemona, Otello, Scottish Opera)

1975 - "It was the sensational Fiordiligi of Sylvia Sass that put every other fine achievement in the shade. Svelte of figure, she moved like a born actress, phrased exquisitely and used her warm, darkish soprano voice with an inborn sense of pitch extactitude and coloring that made her coloratura breathtaking, her slow 'espressivo' moving and her total projection electrifying." (Fiordiligi, Cosė Fan Tutte, Hamburg State Opera)

1976 - "Miss Sass, in one of the most exciting Covent Garden debuts since Callas, held the house spellbound with her Giselda. She is a soprano who can both float a prayer with exquisite poise and launch a cabaletta with ferocious intensity, an artist who brings voice, heart, mind and body together." (Giselda, I Lombardi, Covent Garden)

1976 - "She is young, and quite the most beautiful Violetta of my experience, but it was her singing that bowled me over completely; the mercurial accuracy and brilliance of the coloratura in 'Sempre libera'; the intense tenderness of her second-act duet with Germont pere; and in the last act the touching rendering of 'Addio del passato,' sung in a lovely covered tone..." (Violetta, La Traviata, Aix-en-Provence)

1977 - "Tosca is clearly a part that shows Miss Sass off to best advantage. She is a very good-looking woman who wears the costumes superbly and whose portrayal of a handsome, talented diva seemed to come easily." (Tosca, Tosca, Metropolitan Opera)

1977 - Sass is "an intense, powerful actress who made the drama in Puccini's Tosca live... [she] possesses a big, expressive voice which she used with skill... Miss Sass is beautiful to look at and a vivid personality." (Tosca, Tosca, Metropolitan Opera)

1982 - "[The voice was] much firmer and more precise than it has sometimes seemed on record... an imaginative choice of singer." (Turandot, Turandot, London Barbican)



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