Famous Italian-Russian Soprano Olimpia Boronat was the star of the St Petersburg Mariinsky Theater. Her Russian G&Ts are highly sought after

in her first session w Italian composer and pianist Redento Zardo at the piano 

G&T, St Petersburg 1904

5. 1772L Rigoletto (Verdi): Caro nome 53348


Orig issue G&T Sankt Petersburg 10" 78 rpm 

CONDITION: VERY GOOD PLUS PLUS some light greying, short hiss first turn then plays very quiet rare fuzziness on top notes

A GREAT copy

The following biographical profile of Boronat is written by music critic and writer Michael Scott:
"The lyric coloratura soprano Olimpia Boronat made comparatively few records yet they have always been much admired, and deservedly so, though her career was not the stuff legends are made of. She never appeared at any of those internationally famous opera houses, like New York's Metropolitan, London's Covent Garden, Milan's La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, the Paris Opéra or the Buenos Aires' Colón. As with other Italians before the First World War, like the tenor Angelo Masini and the baritone Mattia Battistini, it was in imperial Russia that she spent her best years. As a result of her experience there, her art harks back to an earlier era. From the beginning, details of her life and career are neither plentiful nor precise. The year of her birth offered by two generally reliable authorities is different; Kutsch and Riemen's Unvergängliche Stimmen states 1867, but Roberto Bauer's Historical Records states 1859; neither gives the date nor month. Desmond Shawe-Taylor, in notes to an HMV-Angel record album [COLH 129], 'Singers of Imperial Russia', claims her father was an Italian army officer and her mother a Spaniard, yet the consonantal ending of her name suggests their nationalities were the other way about. Born in Genoa, she was heard as a child by the Queen Mother of Italy [i.e. Margherita of Savoy - she became Queen Mother of Italy in 1900. Scott had probably referred to a secondary source written after 1900], who was most impressed and made arrangements for her to study at the Milan Conservatory under Pietro Leoni. Her debut took place in Naples either in 1885 or 86, but not at the San Carlo; Carlo Rosconi, in Il Teatro di San Carlo, La Chronologia [1737-1987], does not include her in either year's 'cartellone'. In the first few years of her career she sang around Central and South America. In 1891, after appearances in Italy and Egypt (where a large number of Italians then lived), she proceeded to St. Petersburg as guest at the Mariinsky Theatre, following it with engagements in Moscow, Kiev and Warsaw. The next we learn of her is of her marriage to a Pole, Count Rzewuski (until 1918 Poland was part of imperial Russia). According to one authority the marriage took place in 1893, another states 1902. Whichever is correct, in those days, a marriage into the nobility would have brought the curtain down on her career. If the marriage took place in 1893, it would have lasted only a couple of years; if it did not take place until 1902, and in 1904 she made her first records for the G & T company in St. Petersburg, then she was only retired a couple of years. Her singing certainly sounds fluent, so the second date seems more likely. Four years later she came again for another session. She retired in 1914, and after World War I moved to Warsaw where she opened a school for singing."