Robert Hugill reviews Isabel Bayrakdarian, Constantine Orbelian, Jory Vinikour, and The Kaunas City Symphony’s The Other Cleopatra recording on his Planet Hugill blog:
“Isabel Bayrakdarian [has]… a wide lyric range… [and] a big, vibrant voice which navigates with ease the passage-work required, whilst she is adept also with the varying tessitura’s of the roles. … Bayrakdarian’s gathering of three different composers writing for the same character in the same (-ish) librettos makes a different way of approaching the music. The performances from Orbelian and the Kaunas City Symphony match Bayrakdarian’s performances… with sufficient historically informed style to make them not seem old-fashioned. This seems to have very much been a personal project of Bayrakdarian’s, arising partly out of research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is associate professor of voice and opera, and of course party out of the historical Armenian setting of the operas (Bayrakdarian was born in Armenia, and emigrated to Canada with her parents when she was a girl). She writes a lively introduction in the CD booklet, which includes plot summaries, texts and translations.
—Robert Hugill, Planet Hugill