Decca’s early Italian
opera sets, well regarded at the time,
were looked on as shrill-sounding stopgaps
in their Ace of Clubs incarnations in
the 1960s and received the kiss of death
at the hands of "electronically
enhanced stereo". And that, for
the UK-based listener, has been the
end of it, although CD transfers have
been made of many of them and are available
on the London label in the USA and some
continental European countries.
But on the rare occasions
that I have heard a Decca recording
from the early 1950s in its original
LXT form, or even some of their later
78s, I have always been impressed by
the warm, lifelike quality of the sound.
That sound is far superior to the seedy
strings and ill-defined lower registers
which characterised the same recordings
when they reappeared on Ace of Clubs,
Eclipse and so on. Recent CD transfers
of some of Decca’s Vienna recordings
(for example the Kleiber "Rosenkavalier")
show that their backroom boys have still
not lost the vice of tarting up old
recordings by trying to extract a frequency
range from them that just isn’t there.
It is therefore a pleasure to hear the
musicianly results Mark Obert-Thorn
has obtained, working from good copies
of the original LPs. Distortion is minor
and confined to a few odd moments while
the general effect is clear, warm and
spacious. You won’t get stereo separation
in the big choral scenes but the impact
is considerable even so and the off-stage
effects in the last act are well-handled.
The original engineers were helped by
the fact that the Santa Cecilia Academy
in Rome has a warm and sufficiently
reverberant but very clear acoustic.
This is far more tractable than La Scala
in Milan, where EMI usually worked and
which is wont to produce a boxy sound
with a tubby bass. Furthermore, the
orchestra of Santa Cecilia was the finest
in Italy at that time, combining Italianate
warmth with a clean attack and clarity
of textures, which brings us to the
conductor.
By and large the names
of Tullio Serafin and Antonino Votto,
thanks to their association with Maria
Callas, most of whose recordings they
conducted, are better honoured by posterity
than that of Alberto Erede (1908-2001).
Erede had the bad luck to leave Italy
at about the time Decca were introducing
stereophonic recording and preparing
to re-record the basic Italian repertoire.
Though he was an appreciated presence
on the world stage, including the Deutsch
Oper am Rhein (1958-1962) and Bayreuth
("Lohengrin", 1968), and continued
to conduct (though hardly ever in Italy)
until not long before his recent death,
he became one of those artists who had
the misfortune to work outside the regular
recording circuit.
At first he may initially
seem unduly gentle for "Aida"
– all to often subjected, in the wake
of Toscanini, to "bash and grab"
conducting techniques – but he shows
us just how much of the score is marked
"piano" and "pianissimo",
with such added markings as "cantabile"
and "dolce". He finds mystery
and space in the music as well as grandeur,
while he is not lacking in power in
the Triumph Scene or in dynamism in
such moments as the confrontation between
Aida and Amneris. In short, model Verdi
conducting.
It would be too much
to expect that Erede would persuade
Mario Del Monaco to sing pianissimo
but, while his stentorian bawling was
a liability in many later Decca sets,
here the voice is wonderfully fresh
and secure and he does at least drop
to a "mezzoforte" sometimes.
A heroic and convincing portrayal.
One of the reasons
why the early Decca sets featuring Tebaldi
have been much less reissued than Callas
sets of the same period is that Tebaldi
was a very consistent artist and, unlike
Callas, went into no evident decline
if not in the very last year or two
before her retirement. So, while there
may be good reasons for preferring an
earlier Callas set to a later remake,
in the case of Tebaldi there is no pressing
case for sacrificing the advantages
of later stereo sound. Except that you
do get here the voice in its first flush
of radiant beauty, which is no small
matter considering that it was one of
the most sheerly beautiful voices of
the century. I don’t want to suggest
that it is only beautiful singing,
there is characterisation and feeling
as well, but unlike Callas, she never
sacrificed her beautiful sound for these
other matters. It is an interpretation
which contrasts well with the Amneris
of Ebe Stignani, who demonstrates that
tigerish vocal acting was not just a
Callas invention.
Stignani (1904-1974)
had been Italy’s leading mezzo for some
twenty-five years, though her place
was now being taken by Barbieri and
Simionato. Her tone was still strong
and gleaming, with some magnificent
high notes, and her only concession
to age is that some phrases are broken
which she would no doubt have sung in
a single breath ten years earlier.
The remaining roles
are well handled, by the little-remembered
Dario Caselli as much as by the famed
Fernando Corena, and even Aldo Protti,
a notoriously wooden Germont, is effective
as Amonasro. In short, a cast without
weaknesses and with many strengths.
As is normal with these
Naxos transfers, we get a good presentation
(on which I have drawn above) and a
very detailed synopsis which is some
compensation for the lack of a libretto.
In any case, you can easily pull down
a libretto from Internet of a popular
opera like this. A definitive best choice
for this much recorded opera is probably
impossible but, if your greatest ambition
in life is not to antagonise your neighbours
with the most spectacular digital recording
of the Triumph Scene you can find, then
the case for choosing this one, especially
at the price, is very strong.
Christopher Howell
see also review
by Robert
Farr and Colin
Clarke
Chorus and Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa
Cecilia, Rome/Alberto Erede 