What a great idea to have somebody besides
Cathy Berberian record her husband Luciano Berio's "folk songs"! Not that Berberian's recording isn't great -- it is, but it's been a long time in the catalogue and it's good to hear what another singer does with these enchanting songs.
What mezzo-soprano Dagmar Pekova does with them is to make them, well, exactly what they're supposed to be: enchanting. It's a rare reviewer who can evaluate her pronunciation of Azeri or Sardinian, but this one couldn't understand more than a word or two of her English, and her French seemed heavily accented. If the correct pronunciation of the words of texts in eight different languages matters a lot to you, you might want to skip this recording.
But, frankly, most listeners don't much care about Armenian enunciation. The question is, how well does Pekova sing the songs? And the answer is soulfully, virtuostically, swingingly, and sublimely. But Pekova does more than sing superbly, she seems to get under the skin of the songs, to inhabit the songs she's singing. Whether or not she's pronouncing the words of the Azerbaijan love song correctly, whomever she's singing it to is a lucky guy. A very enjoyable recording.