MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2023
Approaching 60,000 reviews
and more.. and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger


REVIEW


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 



CD or Download: Pristine Classical


Giuseppe VERDI (1813-1901)
Un Ballo in Maschera (1859) [121:55]
Jan Peerce (tenor) - Ricardo
Herva Nelli (soprano) - Amelia
Robert Merrill (baritone) - Renato
Claramae Turner (mezzo) - Ulrica
Virginia Haskins (soprano) - Oscar
George Cehanovsky (baritone) - Silvano
Nicola Moscona (bass) - Samuel
Norman Scott (bass) - Tom
John Carmen Rossi - Judge/Amelia’s servant
Robert Shaw Chorale/Robert Shaw
NBC Symphony Orchestra/Arturo Toscanini
rec. Carnegie Hall, New York City; 17 January 1954 (Act 1) & 24 January 1954 (Acts 2 and 3)
PRISTINE AUDIO PACO032 [64:41 + 57:14]
Experience Classicsonline


It is a never-ending source of wonder to find modern audio technology giving new life to recordings originally made many decades ago. The best technicians – usually those with a strong musical background - can remove not only clicks, crackles and pops but, indeed, the whole opaque fuzziness that we had always assumed to be inherent in “primitive” recording processes. And now, thanks to the application of even more advanced technologies, we can hear sounds that, while certainly captured at the time of the original recording, have never since – thanks to relatively poor playback mechanisms – been suspected to have been there at all. 

Thus, last year Music & Arts’s re-release of the best known of Furtwängler’s Bruckner recordings, “digitally remastered ... by Aaron Z. Schnyder, using the revolutionary new harmonic balancing technique”, offered striking new clarity to those classic accounts. And now I have in front of me Pristine Audio’s reissue of Toscanini’s incandescent account of Ballo, originally recorded over two sessions in January 1954 and newly remastered in the “XR” process. 

Most technological developments these days are beyond my limited understanding, but there is a lucid and very helpful – as well as thought-provoking – explanation of XR on Pristine Audio’s website. And I can certainly confirm that, on the basis of this release, the results of applying XR technology can be very striking. 

Un Ballo in Maschera is my personal favourite of Verdi’s operas and Toscanini’s account has always been my first choice of recordings. Of all the 71 volumes in RCA’s collected Arturo Toscanini Collection, it – volume 59 in case you are wondering – is probably the one I take most frequently from my shelves. The star of the whole show is Toscanini himself displaying unrivalled passion, drive and fervour. “This”, the conductor observed after making the recording, “was my last opera performance. I began by hearing a performance of Un Ballo in Maschera at the age of four (his memory was playing him false: he had actually been just three years old!) up in the gallery, and I’ve finished by conducting it at 87”. 

The sheer urgency with which Toscanini drives the NBC Symphony Orchestra is tremendous – and must have been tremendously challenging – but the players respond as if their lives depended on it - their careers quite possibly did. Thanks to the survival of a great deal of filmed material, notably the famous pioneering “TV concerts” of the late 1940s, we are quite familiar with the conductor’s baton technique and, as one listens to these discs, it is quite easy in the mind’s eye to see him slashing away with a degree of energy more appropriate to a man half his age. XR technology successfully and strikingly uncovers a great deal of orchestral detail – notably among some especially plangent woodwinds – that has hitherto remained largely hidden. 

It has sometimes been suggested that Toscanini preferred working with less than top rank singers as they were more likely to be amenable to his strict disciplinary style and less likely to have minds of their own. There is some evidence to contradict that idea – notably the fact that, for this very recording, the stellar Jussi Björling had actually been scheduled to sing Riccardo (yes, we are in Boston, not Stockholm) and was only prevented from doing so by last minute indisposition. Nevertheless, the way in which Toscanini exercised psychological domination over many singers can easily be seen in the 1949 televised concert performance of Aida where soprano Herva Nelli resembles at times nothing so much as a terrified rabbit caught in the headlights of an approaching sports car - the maestro eventually made amends to some extent by leaving her his baton in his will. 

Here the conductor has assembled a strong and dependable vocal team, many of whom – Nelli, Peerce, Moscona, Scott – he worked with repeatedly in this final stage of his career. It is, if you like, a sort of “in-house” company and, as such, the various voices here are well known, though, with XR’s apparent ability to draw the ear to sounds that can, no matter how familiar you are with previous incarnations of this recording, come as something of a surprise, Nelli’s voice emerges here as notably stronger in its lower registers. As her noble paramour, Jan Peerce, never the most subtle of singers, delivers a forthright account fully in accordance with Toscanini’s high voltage approach: the Act 2 love duet between Riccardo and Amelia, Teco io sto, is a real show-stopper and an undoubted highlight of the whole performance. 

The late Verdi from Toscanini that is most often singled out for special praise – and rightly so – is his unrivalled Falstaff but this new remastering of Ballo - marred only by disappointingly dreary artwork, inadequate packaging and the fact that full notes can only be accessed online – may well help it achieve the equal recognition it deserves as a definitive account of a wonderful score.

Rob Maynard 



 

 
 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools




Return to Review Index

Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.