Customer Reviews

Verdi - Un ballo in maschera / Arroyo · Domingo · Cappuccilli · Cossotto · Grist · NPO · Muti

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Having a great conductor/orchestra and one of the worlds most celebrated tenors certainly can't hurt, but this recording features a great baritone and a legendary mezzo. Last but not least, it also features a soprano of true distinction as well.

Martina Arroyo could always hold her own with the great sopranos of her day--a fact too easily forgotten. In this performance she actually beats out the competition, competition that includes Milanov, Tebaldi, and Price. Most critics would agree that this is Arroyo's finest recorded performance. And what a performance it is! Vocally, she is resplendent, and the recording is a glowing tribute to a soprano too often overshadowed by her contemporaries, but one who should never for a moment be overlooked or allowed to become an operatic footnote. Arroyo's performance demands that we sit up and take notice--and admire.

Rccardo Muti earned his geatest acclaim as a Verdi conductor and a disciplinarian of the often unruly La Scala orchestra. They don't play on this Un Balo, but he makes the New Philharmonia sound earthy and vigorous. I like this rougher approach to Verdi beter than either abbado's over-polish or Solti's manic drive. Both have good versions of Un Ballo that set a standrd for Muti to live up to.

On the whole he succeeds. Domingo delivers one of his prime Verdi roles, perfeclty suited to his voice, as does Cossotto as Ulrica. Cappuccilli gives a strong but not totally memorable Renato -- he never seems to peirce to the heart of any character. If only Arroyo had been a stronger Amelia, this recording might rank at the very top, but she is rather bland and too careful in her phrasing -- the voice per se is lovely and evenly produced, even if it lacks spinto power. Callas and Leontyne Price have nothing to fear.

Overall, this set joins quite a few other first-rate Un Ballos that don't quite reach classic status. Callas and DiStefano are great, but their conductor, Votto, is a dud. Leontyne Price brings great power to the role and is almost matched by Carlo Bergonzi, but Leinsdorf is sluggish and without imagination. My favorite, when all is said and done, remains the 1985 Decca version with Pavarotti and Margaret Price. It reaches the heights when it counts, as in the Act II love scene, and Solti never forgets that Verdi is about passion and the tragic power of fate.

This opera combines wonderfully entertaining music with a wacky setting. Its reputation has been unfairly weakened by an implausible setting in New England. Verdi was never Romantic enough to care much about national cultures, especially a culture distinguishing colonial New England from a Protestant nation like Sweden. Italy for centuries had not been a nation but the heartland of the ancient Roman Empire and the international Roman Catholic Church. That perspective translated into a neoclassical indifference toward deviant provincial cultures. Italian opera composers such as Jommelli and Paisiello flourished in the neoclassical period; and Rossini's style did not differ all that much from theirs. Although Verdi sometimes looked back with disdain on Rossini's stylistic limitations, neither Bellini, Donizetti nor Verdi himself ever broke with certain Italian characteristics derived from that older tradition. That tradition meant an implicit internationalism making New England nothing but just another province, in fact a province of another province, Britannia.

The weird woman in a cave, Ulrica (sung by Fiorenza Cossutto), is just another version of Azucena, who is set in Spain (the province of Hispania) in Il Trovatore. In Verdi's imagination a "strega" is basically a "strega" no matter where she appears, out in the provinces or back home in Italy. Cultural anachronisms such as the masked ball or the dueling code may ignore actual New England Protestantism; but Protestantism, in this view, is provincial religion not to be taken seriously. Why, for that matter, should the new republic in North America be essentially all that different from the old republic of Venice, which neatly went out of existence a decade after the completion of the United States constitution. As I listen to the bell-clear tones of Reri Grist as the page Oscar, my imagination accepts the premise that I am witnessing events from the basic world of Western Civilization as viewed from the heartland.