Soile Isokoski, one of the world’s most sought-after sopranos, has crept into the upper echelons of her profession almost unnoticed, but can no longer be ignored. Soile Isokoski has won prizes in the BBC Singer of the World, the Elly Ameling and Tokyo International Singing Competitions, and now regularly works with numerous great conductors, such as Abbado, Mehta, Ozawa, Muti, Barenboim and Järvi. She appears on this CD with her regular recital and recording partner Marita Viitasalo.

A favourite of the Met, La Scala and Covent Garden, Soile Isokoski has established a first class pedigree as an operatic singer, and is now making her mark in the UK as a recitalist. In 2002 she won a Gramophone Award for her Ondine recording of Strauss’s Four Last Songs – ‘Strauss singing doesn’t come much better than this. I suspect that the composer himself‚ with his love of the soprano voice‚ would have been enthralled by Isokoski’s glorious singing’
 

“She ranks among today’s finest sopranos by virtue of the fact that her voice is one of the greatest in the world, hitting you in the solar plexus each time you listen to it. On a concert platform, however, she’s remarkably self-effacing, never indulging in self-conscious histrionics and concentrating all her energies on the expressive potential of the glorious sound that issues from her throat”
 

Isokoski sings Morgen with a rapt sense of amorous wonderment, while the ecstatic outpouring of emotion in Cäcilie summons a thrilling élan from the Finnish soprano. She is superb, too, in the Sibelius group … For one of her encores, Isokoski demonstrates that she can give Renée Fleming a run for her money with a sensuously phrased rendering of Gershwin’s Summertime
This BBC lunchtime recital effectively combines the native and foreign talents of a singer whose technique and intelligence have shone brightly on opera and concert stages (and on disc) in the last decade … the whole Sibelius group, anything but an easy opener for the programme, sets exacting challenges to which Isokoski rises, culminating in the mini-opera ‘The maiden’s tryst’. In the Strauss songs, a well chosen group concentrating on Strauss’s marriage and fatherhood, Isokoski is realistically touching in ‘Meinem Kinde’ and precisely focuses in on the dreamy eroticism of ‘Cäcilie’ … This is an important souvenir of fine recital singing


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