Tebaldi in Glorious Voice
J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 11/02/2003
(4 out of 5 stars)
"This complete recording of 'Madama Butterfly' from 1951 was the first of two that Renata Tebaldi made. The one made about five years later was the one that most of us remember. It also had Carlo Bergonzi as Pinkerton, and that recording is one of the great ones. This one, made before Tebaldi had ever sung Butterfly on the stage, has the advantage of Tebaldi being in the first flush of her success and in glorious voice. Indeed, I think this performance is better than the later one. 'Un bel di' will tear your heart out. Unfortunately, her colleagues are not quite up to her standard. Tenor Giuseppe Campora had a sweet natural tenor voice, but when compared with Bergonzi in the later recording, he pales. Still, what we wouldn't do to have tenors like Campora these days? If he were singing today, he'd be considered one of the current greats. Nell Rankin's Suzuki is rather faceless, and certainly not up to the incandescent performance of the young Fiorenza Cossotto in the later recording. Sharpless is sung by Giovanni Inghilleri toward the end of his long career, and the voice is practically gone.Still, this performance, accompanied by Alberto Erede conducting the Chorus and Orchestra of the Santa Cecilia in Rome, is quite creditable. And Naxos's budget price makes it a real bargain. As usual with Naxos historic opera recordings, there is no libretto. But then I don't imagine anyone will be buying this as their only Butterfly. No, it is for those of us who love the sound of Tebaldi's voice and who collect most of her recordings. I never heard the original recording on LP, but I must say that the mono sound is quite good; I suspect we can thank transfer engineer, Mark Obert-Thorn, for that. He's certainly been an ace up Naxos's sleeve with his and Ward Marston's transfers of historical material. As lagniappe there are, on CD 2, several arias sung by Tebaldi and recorded a couple of years earlier. They are 'In quelle trine morbide' from 'Manon Lescaut,' 'Tacea la notte placida' from Verdi's 'Il Trovatore,' and 'Il était un roi de Thulé' and the following 'Jewel Song' from Gounod's Faust. The latter is strange in that 'Il était' is sung in French, and then the Jewel Song is in Italian. As Marguerite, Tebaldi sounds downright girlish, not a quality she was ever noted for. It's a pity she had no trill for the first note of the Jewel Song. But then you can't have everything, I guess. It is otherwise splendid. CD1: 72:18
CD2: 73:58TT: 2:26:26Scott Morrison"
