Schipa Vol.2 8.110333 [JW]: Classical CD Reviews- March 2006 MusicWeb-International

It’s a renewed pleasure to encounter Schipa again in this second volume of Naxos’s series devoted to the luminously liquid and most elegant of tenors. The repertoire is perfect and this selection takes him from late acoustic to early electric Victors.

Every track has something to disclose. The Rigoletto shows us the perfectly calibrated rubati he employed and of which he was a master. We also have the ineffable Galli-Curci joining him, their tonal consonance and mutual feeling a permanent wonder. We can appreciate the elegant laser of her voice – not that laser implies hardness, just a crystalline purity – in the Lucia extract where Schipa is the very personification of honeyed warmth, stylistic probity and unforced lyricism. This is surely one of the greatest accounts of Verranno a te on disc. Both caress the legato of the Donizetti to perfection.

Curiously there are some very high take numbers for the Barthelemy and Schipa’s own Ave Maria – did he really take eleven takes for the former and five for the latter? – and these marked the change from acoustic to electric recordings. His athletic masculinity is evident in the De Crescenzo but when he turned to La donna è mobile the following day he did so with witty characterisation but no undue exaggeration – that was not Schipa’s way.

His animating rhythmic sense can be felt throughout the de Falla and the colouristic palette he imparted equally so in his own arrangement of that old standby, La farfalletta which has the fleck of Aria Antiche, and the fresh voiced warmth that would have animated Caccini and Handel. We can contrast Schipa’s liquid elegance in Donizetti’s Una furtive lagrima – both published takes are here – with an almost contemporaneous Gigli recording which is altogether more extrovert and bullish. Similarly we can contrast Lucrezia Bori’s warmth with Galli-Curci’s gem stone perfection. Both are wondrous but Bori makes a stupendous match for Schipa by virtue of her tonal depth – Schipa, being the artist he was, accommodates both perspectives with no loss of musical point and no lessening of dramatic or expressive potential.

The transfers are first class, lifelike and very present without being unduly spotlit. Collectors will recall them from Romophone where they first appeared a number of years ago. Needless to say a recommendation from me is utterly superfluous.

Jonathan Woolf

see also Review by Göran Forsling

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