BUY NOW 

AmazonUK   AmazonUS

"Immortal Performances" is the rubric under which this Christmas Day, 1949 NY Philharmonic broadcast is offered. It is indeed a famous performance and was issued by several private sources during the LP era, most widely perhaps as BJR 510. Now it is revived on CD and generously filled out with arias and duets by its Elektra, Astrid Varnay.

How does the performance stand up to legend half a century on? Not entirely successfully, I fear. By now several of Varnay's assumptions of this, one of her most noted roles, have appeared. There is a 1953 German radio performance with a cast at least the equal of this one (the young Rysanek and Hans Hotter prominent within it). This is available on both the Orfeo and Gala labels. The latter, at bargain price like this Guild issue, includes as a bonus a sizeable portion of the first Act of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier taken from a Metropolitan Opera performance of 1953 with Varnay as the Marschallin and Rise Stevens as Octavian - and with Fritz Reiner conducting.

Reiner also leads the Met's own issue of its 1952 Elektra broadcast with Varnay, Hoengen, Svanholm and Schoeffler - again a cast to rival that of 1949. There is also a later (1964) Salzburg Elektra under Karajan but with Varnay past her best vocal state.

All of these have the advantage of being more complete than the 1949 edition which, in addition to taking almost all the standard cuts (a portion of Elektra's solo in her scene with Orestes, frequently omitted in performance is, however, restored here), omits entirely Chrysothemis's second scene with Elektra, jumping from the end of the Elektra-Klytemnestra encounter to that between Elektra and Orestes! Perhaps this was done to spare Irene Jessner, near the end of her career as Chrysothemis and giving evidence of distinct limits around the A above the stave. Some of the B naturals in the final scene are more willed than sung, the more distressing as, since the underpinning choral lines are omitted, Chrysothemis, in this edition, is more exposed.

Herbert Jannsen too was by this time within a couple of years of retirement. The once lustrous sound has greyed and, it must be said, his is not one of the more commanding Orestes on disc. Frederick Jagel, on the other hand, though he too would soon retire f