favorite SOPRANO?

If you're looking for beautiful soprano voices that "absolutely melt you away," I'd recommend in particular (limiting this to the about last 50 years) Victoria de los Angeles, Leontyne Price, Zinka Milanov, Renata Tebaldi, Joan Sutherland, and Renee Fleming. All had/have major soprano voices of great beauty, and all could/can "absolutely melt you away" when in their primes. Callas was a great singer and a great artist but not conspicuous for the beauty of her voice, which always had problems. Bartoli is a fine artist but not a soprano.

Gaudio eek, I agree about Milanov's "Pace pace mio Dio" (the old mono one), a great recording. In her prime she could float a high pianissimo like no one else. Her 1952 mono "Il Trovatore" with Bjoerling, Warren, and Barbieri (still the best one) has more of these ravishing, floated high pianissimos.

Yes, Kiri Te Kanawa should have been on my short list of most beautiful soprano voices, and here's a stunning, offbeat track of hers that most opera buffs don't know about. In 1974, when she was in her youthful prime, not yet an internationally famous singer, she recorded the aria from the mythical opera Salammbo in the RCA "Classic Film Scores" series: the recording (issued as both LP and CD) is "Citizen Kane: Classic Film Scores of Bernard Herrmann," Charles Gerhardt conducting the National Philharmonic Orchestra. Like all the recordings in this series, this was engineered by the great Kenneth Wilkinson, and this is one of Wilkie's triumphs: the sound is simply awesome; the music is colorful, imaginative, original, with lots of unusual sounds; the entire recording is an audiophile's delight from beginning to end. Young Kiri's singing is breathtaking, and her aria, played on a first-rate system, will knock your socks off.