Customer Reviews

Guglielmo Tell

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1 star:		(5)

 

 

Do NOT buy this recording. The recording quality of this set is so bad that I threw it away after struggling through most of one CD. GALA opera CDs are "hit or miss", and this one is the worst. It is literally the worst recorded sound I have ever heard commercially released. The whole thing sounds like someone shouting down a pipe. It's a shame because the cast has some excellent singers, but you wouldn't know it from this recording. GALA should be ashamed of themselves for even releasing it.

This recording sounds like someone snuck a cheap cassette recorder into the theater, took his seat in the upper balcony, and recorded the performance while hiding the recorder under his coat. The orchestra sounds like it is off in the far distance, and the voices can barely be heard.

This set was so bad that I didn't even try to resell it. I just threw it in the trash. Don't waste your money on this badly recorded set.

It seems that the microphone was put in front of the mouth of a person that coughs all time. The "diva" is the coughing man; the principal voices and the chorus seem to be so far, that it's very difficult yo hear the music. I rate this item with one star just because I love Rossini and I respect Muti.

Cast is great with Gedda sailing all over the place with high D's. Recording is horrible with what sounds live severe reverb and done far away from the stage. Recording sounds like the Act 1 duet in Boheme where the soprano and tenor turn their backs during the recording to get the effect of being very distant. By third cd I threw the whole set out the car window. Buy the Opera d'oro set or the Pavarotti. The best set is the old Cetra set which has been rereleased on a reissue label with Filippeschi or the other one with Gianni Raimondi. The Filippeschi is about 1952 but is even far superior to the Pavarotti version where Pavarotti is out of his element. It is too bad as this label usually has top rate casts and recording. This is a clunker of the first order. This is one of those operas which require a first rate cast due to the technical demands. Dr Thomas O'Shaughnessy

Permit me to reiterate the sentiments of certain other reviewers: DO NOT BUY THIS RECORDING. The performance is of the Italian version rendered by Calisto Bassi and not the original French version created by Etienne de Jouy and Hippolyte Bis after Friedrich Schiller. The set comes with a synopsis but no libretto. Recorded in 1972, the musical performance is fairly well-conceived by a young Riccardo Muti, even if the work as a whole is very substantially abbreviated coming in at 227 minutes. The great Eva Marton puts in what would have been a glowing appearance at a time when her early-career wobble had yet to develop. Save for Marton, the other cast members are unknown to me but, given a finer recording, might well have been adequate or better.

Those things said, the recording itself and the transfer are amateurish and largely unlistenable. Even a fairly sophisticated playback system like my own cannot compensate for its miserable, non-commercial quality. The rightly-famous overture, or Sinfonia, would seem to have been recorded in some third-world diphtheria ward, kinehora; it bears broken trumpet notes in the well-known fanfare that opens the final section and the ragged entrances and poor intonation that characterize a junior high school orchestra.

The only saving grace is getting to hear (from about a thousand meters away from the stage, it would seem) the great, fiery ensemble beginning Ció ch'ei fece l'oserebbe that brings Act One to a bang-up close and that contains what would be Rossini's last and maybe best Rossini crescendo. I hope that Amazon will let me get away with suggesting that the recording itself is heavy on the fece. Like another reviewer, I will not attempt to resell this set and am reluctant even to give it away lest some poor, unsuspecting schnook accuse me of an infamia. If you read this, don't be the schnook.

There IS an exceptional Tell performance c. 1979 on London / Decca led by Riccardo Chailly leading the National Philharmonic and featuring superb artists (e.g., Sherrill Milnes as Tell, Luciano Pavarotti as Arnoldo, Mirella Freni as Matilde, and Nicolai Ghiaurov as Gualtiero Fürst) and a superior musical conception also employing the Italian rendering. To illustrate the extent to which I have enjoyed this performance over the years, let me say that my old LP set is worn through and my audio cassette set is shedding iron oxide dust into the box. My CD transfer set of the same performance is swell but somehow lacks the depth of the LPs.

Chailly's broadly-paced Sinfonia might well be the finest on record (such `cellos, such trombones!) save perhaps one of the Toscanini performances that I own the pacing of which is rather brisk for my taste and the sound, ah, seriously dated. The edition used in this recording comes in at about 255 minutes, which still abbreviates Rossini's nearly 360 minute score.


I have discovered that the Chailly recording has recently been digitally remastered (96 Khz - 24 bit) for Decca and is now available through Amazon [...] where it now tops my wish list. [Gee, how many times will I have buy this thing?]

In closing, I must report that the present Tell is not the first time that the Gala label has disappointed me but, in all fairness, I must say that a number of that organization's releases have been eminently satisfactory and have rescued from the vaults many worthy performances, often of obscure works that merit the attention of music lovers. In the present case, I respectfully submit that Gala made a mistake. Nonetheless, I forgive that organization. After all, I made a mistake once, too.

Yes, 'twas in 1952, I seem to recall. In August. On a Tuesday.


Addendum: I have just stumbled on a Tell performance led by Muti with La Scala forces on DVD. It is available through Amazon [...] and, never having seen a staged performance of this work, I have added it to my wish list in spite of some reviewer comments.