The above recording is, I think, one of the best examples of a great contralto voice. A contralto is a woman who has a very strong chest register — that's those strident low notes that sound quite shocking to modern ears, because the chest voice has gone out of fashion and no one uses it any more.
Which means our contraltos have all disappeared, because now they're just using the middle voice, which ought to rule the next octave above the chest notes. It has a softer sound, but in contraltos is still very strong and rich. Modern singing technique pushes the middle voice too high and too low, so that the low notes fade away and can't be heard, and the high notes turn into screams.
And if you can't scream the high notes, they call you a mezzo soprano, which means a 'half soprano', which basically means 'the loser category', because you can't get the high notes, and you can't get the low notes, and you don't get any of the good numbers to sing.
At the moment, we have a glut of mezzo sopranos, because really they're either contraltos who haven't found their chest voice, or they're sopranos who haven't found their head voice. And if the head voice doesn't come back into fashion some time soon, the high soprano will go the same way as the contralto and the dodo, and we won't hear the likes of this ever again:
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