Search - Piero Cappuccilli, Gabriele Lechner, Ludmila Schemtschuk :: Verdi: Un ballo in maschera

Luciano Pavarottis repertoire comprised only a few roles, but his performances and recordings of them wrote and rewrote history. This was the case in 1970 as Nemorino (in Lelisir damore) alongside Joan Sutherland and in 1972 as Rodolfo (in La Bohème) under Karajan, with Mirella Freni als Mimí. But while Pavarottis Riccardo (Gustavo III) in Verdis Un ballo in maschera in his studio recording of 1983 is given pride of place because of its surface brilliance (not least thanks to Georg Solti on the podium), in his live TV broadcast of the same role three years later under Claudio Abbado he offers a striking sense of musical and dramatic immediacy. In this recording of that broadcast from the Vienna State Opera, we can hear a performance both highly nuanced and possessed of an immense radiance, from his very first Amici mei to his touching death scene.