If we're in the mood to listen to Rossini or Donizetti nowadays, we can just go to the shelf and select a CD from the dozens which are available. What we tend to forget is that without the efforts in the 1970s of a handful of people, of whom Montserrat Caballe was probably the most indefatigable, none of these recordings would exist and the art of bel canto might well have been lost forever. Had she achieved nothing else, this would be an achievement worth noting. As it happens, though, Caballe deserves the epithet "one of the century's great voices"; and her biography is packed with action from her early days of abject poverty in Barcelona to her collaboration with Freddie Mercury on the rock anthem which pays homage to the Catalan capital.
Pullen and Taylor capture it all, including her mind-boggling four thousand operatic performances, without becoming wearisomely repetitive or (despite its being an "authorised" biography) overly ingratiating.
