Do spinto-sopranos typically have a dark timbre to their voice?
Not necessarily. A spinto soprano would have a heftier vocal weight than your typical lyric sopranos do… And usually a singer’s voice gets heavier with age (and that tends to involve some darker coloration, but not always), so spinto sopranos usually are older than their lyric counterparts… and some may have slightly darker sound. The Slavic sopranos usually come with a darker timbre to begin with. Many of these voices get pushed into the spinto repertoire, that may account for greater prevalent of darker timbre there… But ‘lyric’, ‘spinto’, ‘dramatic’ really just denote vocal weights and not tone color. The lower tessitura voice, mezzo-soprano, on the other hand, usually come with darker vocal timbre than found in their soprano colleagues.
