THE COLLECTION
Opera lovers are much like wine collectors. We store our vintage recordings in our own equivalent of cellars and get them out for a tasting ('listening') when we find a suitable time to enjoy them. Sometimes, there will be a darkening of the summer skies and we'll just know it's time for Leontyne Price's 1977 RCA recording of Verdi's 'La Forza Del Destino' or Solti's 'Der Fliegende Hollander' on Decca from the same year. Then, on those rare days of English sunshine, we'll prefer to crack out the Karl Bohm 1962 'Cosi Fan Tutte' or the Giulini 1959 'Le Nozze Di Figaro', both on EMI, as we imagine ourselves in sunny Naples around the end of the 18th Century with Fiordiligi and Dorabella or relaxing at Count Almaviva's castle near Seville. Just the other day I spent the afternoon with 'Gianni Schicchi' (Ferencksic) and others in 13th Century Florence where I could see the opaque waters of the Arno set before the Ponte Vecchio and imagined myself like a swift soaring above the white marble facade of the duomo as I listened to 'Avete Torto' and 'O Mio Babbino Caro'.
Choosing the most atmospheric version of Puccini's 'La Boheme' (Karajan), Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel' (Karajan) or Tchaikovsky's 'Eugene Onegin' (Solti) in the depths of winter can seem as essential for surviving the cold season as collecting firewood to keep you warm. A 'Boheme' without a perfect sense of dishevelled Parisian squalor will be instantly dismissed, a Cavalleria Rusticana (Muti) without the blistering, shimmering heat of a Sicilian sun equally so. And sometimes, when I'm feeling in a dank and subterranean mood, I reach for a 'Fidelio' (Klemperer) to capture the perfect sense of Florestan's imprisonment. If I can't smell the damp moisture of the Spanish cell in the recording then off to the charity shop it goes.
Some operas require multiple recordings to get a full understanding of the works. Puccini's 'Madam Butterfly', Mozart's 'Don Giovanni' and Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde' cannot be fully comprehended on one version alone and so often the collector finds he or she has sub categories within collections just like wine collectors might have multiple bottles (from different years) of the same label. I have at least four 'Toscas' to refer to, including the classic Callas and Gobbi one on EMI from 1953 to the more luxurious Karajan stereo version with José Carreras and Katia Ricciarelli from 1980 on Deutsche Grammophon. I'm still undecided who is my favourite Cavaradossi but it's probably Giuseppe Di Stefano.
My first forays into recorded opera came from listening to a crackly cassette of a recording from 1932 of Donizetti's 'Don Pasquale' featuring Tito Schipa and conducted by Carlo Sabajno lent to me by a one Mr Morgan, as well as borrowing prized CD boxes from Stringer's coveted collection (see 'Stringer' 01/18/22) and zoning out with those rich Decca, Phillips and Deutsch Grammophon recordings in a sort of dream trance. Solti's 'Meistersinger' (1976) and Hans Knappertsbusch's supernatural 'Parsifal' (1962) transported me to historic and mythic places like having my very own time portal. And I can remember vividly the first time I listened to Reginald Goodall's recording of Wagner's 'The Valkyrie' (Chandos) in deep winter as the snow flakes began to fall outside my window in perfect time with the orchestra and Albert Remidios's muscular voice sang 'Winter storm' which echoed through the trees in the still white landscape. It's been this kind of cosmic alignment with recordings, memories and environments that has made me an 'expert' in the field without having any real formal musical education and I would happily challenge the old guard of critics Edward Greenfield, Ivan March and Robert Layton who wrote the 'Penguin Guide To Opera On Compact Disc' with my 'lived experience'.
Now, having acquired a considerable cellar myself, I've got to the point where it makes more sense to drink what I have (metaphorically you understand) in my collection rather than just let the 'bottles' simply collect dust. This brings with it a kind of pressure as you have to decide if you're forcing the occasion to get through your riches rather than let destiny (forza) determine when you should play them i.e optimal atmospheric conditions etc.
There are, of course, those dream recordings where one can only imagine how good they would have been had they been preserved for posterity. Carlos Kleiber's 'Fidelio' and 'Die Meistersinger' come to mind, as does Furtwangler's 'Parsifal' and Karajan's 'La Forza Del Destino' but alas, these dreams cannot be drunk so we move on.
And then there are those rare times when you stumble upon some opera recording you've never heard of before and you settle down with it to compare it to the entire recorded history of that exact same piece. Just recently I chanced upon a sublime 1961 recording of Verdi's Don Carlo (the Italian five act version) conducted by Gabriele Santini on Deutsch Grammophon and it has instantly, for reasons I can't fully explain, become my favourite version although I'll still be returning to the electrifying and controversial Karajan four act version on EMI recorded in 1978 as well as the solid Solti from 1965 on Decca.
The ideal thing when you reach the kind of exhaustive accumulation of so many recordings over time as I have is to distill the collection by having just one recording of each great opera.
And so, to test this concept I will recommend ten of the best recordings (using my atmospheric criteria) to recommend to anyone reading this who might be interested.
10. Die Meistersinger Von Nürnberg (Solti) on Decca (1976)
9. Un Ballo In Maschera (Leinsdorf) on RCA (1967)
8. La Fanciulla Del West (Capuana) on Decca (1958)
7, Salome (Karajan) on EMI (1977)
6. Fidelio (Klemperer) on EMI (1962)
5. Die Walküre (Solti) on Decca (1965)
4. Le Nozze Di Figaro (Bohm) on DG (1968)
3. Tristan und Isolde (Bohm) on DG (1966)
2. Falstaff (Karajan) on EMI (1957)
1. La Boheme (Karajan) on Decca (1974)
And if you still won't take my word for it, try a taste of this.