AVAILABILITY
www.preiserrecords.at
It’s easy to overlook
the many recordings made by smaller
companies in Europe in the early 1950s.
One, Remington, was active especially
in Austria and Italy and Preiser’s retrieval
of this Rigoletto was a Remington set
recorded in Florence in 1951. It didn’t
have a particularly long shelf-life
nor did it ever make much of an impression
on the international market and the
reasons are twofold; firstly the recording
is subfusc and secondly the cast is
uneven.
That said, let’s get
the demerits out of the way. As the
brief note admits – Preiser provides
just a cast list and track listing with
a producer’s paragraph outlining the
recording details – the original Remington
tapes were seemingly defective. Two
such tapes, in fact, threw up the same
problems. The sound is very constricted
and there is a raw, brazen quality to
it that is especially noticeable with
the desiccated violin tone. There also
seems to have been some damage to the
master tape on track ten (Già
da tre) where there’s intermittent
squawking and there’s pitch slippage
on track 15 (Zitti, ziti moviamo
a vendetta) and a small but unavoidable
(it’s the end of Act I after all) complete
break up of the sound. So it’s not an
easy listen and given the vagaries of
casting - only Petrov is really a headliner
– this is without question an acquisition
for specialists.
Petrov proves characterful
and strong – not over projected. Sarri
is considerably less subtle, indeed
one dimensional and of the women Orlandini
shows flair and projection but is brittle
sounding (the recording doesn’t help
at all). Ghiglia has no remarkable or
ear-catching insights into the score
and sounds happy to pretty much follow
the leads.
Preiser has issued
an all-Petrov disc, which is well worth
acquiring, and they supplement it here
with some arias from his repertoire,
again Remingtons and made at the same
time one assumes. His Rossini is hardly
Tibbett like in its lasered centre but
it is attractively done and his Macbeth
is possibly the pick of the bunch of
five, with the Pagliacci extract showing
almost the same kind of intensity.
I would urge caution
here to all but inveterate Verdians.
Petrov enthusiasts will want it but
the recording problems are such that
this is really for specialist interest
only.
Jonathan Woolf
Chorus of the Teatro Communale, Florence 
