The
list of Trovatore recordings is long but surprisingly
few are real top contenders. My personal “top five” includes
Cellini (RCA Victor, now available on Naxos), Serafin
(DG), Mehta (RCA Victor), Giulini (DG) and lately the sensationally
refurbished MET recording from 1947, conducted by Emil
Cooper and with Björling and Warren on top form. And where
does this EMI set stand?
It
is not on a level with the aforementioned sets, but with such
names in the cast it isn’t without merit. Thomas Schippers,
who died from lung cancer at the age of 47, was one of the leading
opera conductors, not least at the Met and La Scala, and he
made a number of highly regarded recordings. During the Trovatore
sessions in Rome in 1964 he was obviously in a frantic mood,
since this is in many ways the most hard-driven performance
I have heard. I bought a highlights LP many years ago, tempted
by the famous singers, but I rarely played it, due to the relentless
over-drive of his direction. Well, not all the time. He does
relax at some crucial moments where sensitivity is called for,
notably in the last act, where the Azucena-Manrico duet is as
sensitive as it should be and his singers respond accordingly.
The final ensemble is also well shaped. On the other hand he
pulls out all the stops in the Leonora-Count di Luna scene,
which is one of the most frenetic Verdi scenes I have heard,
and rarely has the anvil chorus in act 2 been so rushed. It’s
like Oxford Street five minutes before closing time. And these
are only the most flagrant examples. Too much is unsubtle –
but thrilling. Of course this opera is fairly one-dimensional
and playing down the thrill makes it pale, however gorgeous
the tunes are, but one need only go to Serafin’s DG version,
roughly contemporaneous with Schippers, to hear what is missing.
The
singers are compliant with this brusque approach, or perhaps
it is more correct to believe they were chosen to fit in with
Schippers’s approach. They are big voiced and truly Italianate
in timbre and in that respect this sounds like an idiomatic
performance – if it is blood and thunder one is after.
Ferruccio
Mazzoli is an accomplished Ferrando and Abbietta zingara
has an appealing lilt. Gabriella Tucci has several fine moments
but is too often shrill and unsteady and sometimes yelps, as
in the final trio of act 1. She recovers in the last act however,
where in her aria she floats the high pianissimo notes admirably.
She is also very sensitive in the final ensemble. She is impressively
agile and dramatic in the high octane scene with Luna Mira,
d’acerbe lagrime.
Franco
Corelli is his usual self: singing with heroic tone and tremendous
power but marring the musical line with glottal stops, hiccups
and terrible scooping. In the third act he sings Ah si, ben
mio with a great deal of feeling but also is over-emphatic
and disrupts the flow of the music. Nobody can deny, though,
that he had a glorious voice and had he been able to husband
it better he would have been a truly great tenor. He shows his
technical capacity in a breathtaking diminuendo near the end
of the aria but as so often with Corelli it feels like a circus
number more than an expression of true feelings. His best moments
are the duet with Azucena in the last act. Robert Merrill is
a sturdy Luna, but Il balen, though impressively executed,
has little of the youthful passion that his compatriot Leonard
Warren could muster - Cellini, even more impressive with Cooper.
In
many ways the finest performance here is Giulietta Simionato’s
Azucena. This was to be her last recording and the voice has
undoubtedly lost in quality since she recorded the role for
Decca in the 1950s. Her experience and sympathy with the role
are however compensation enough. Her reading is the one I have
returned to most often in the past.
I
haven’t made an inventory of what other highlights discs are
available at the moment. The present one is primarily for those
who are diehard admirers of one or other of the singers. With
more than 70 minutes’ playing time and at budget price it is
reasonable value for money, but my advice is to save up for
one of the complete versions mentioned in the first paragraph
of this review, to which list could be added Karajan’s recording
with Callas and Di Stefano, recently reissued by Naxos.
Göran
Forsling
Franco Corelli
(tenor) – Manrico; Gabriella Tucci (soprano) – Leonora; Luciana
Moneta (mezzo) – Inez; Giulietta Simionato (mezzo) – Azucena; Robert
Merrill (baritone) – Count di Luna; Ferruccio Mazzoli (bass) – Ferrando;
Angelo Mercuriali (tenor) – Ruiz; Mario Rinaudo (bass) – An Old
Gypsy 
