Andrew Clements CDs of the week
Naxos deserves an award. Using archive material supplied by the Canadian-based Immortal Performances of Recorded Music Society, they’ve secured the commercial release of operatic radio broadcasts, taken from live performances from 1937 to 1943, some of them hitherto only available as expensive bootlegs.
Not everyone will like these: recording techniques weren’t ideal back then, although the sound is always acceptable and in some instances astonishingly good. Critical editions weren’t in vogue in those days either, so if you blanch at the idea of cuts, think twice. If you’ve any sense, however, you’ll buy at least four and preferably six of the seven, because – with one exception – they contain some of the greatest performances in music history.
The exception is Strauss’s Night in Venice, from Berlin in 1938. Marcel Wittrisch is an elegant Caramelio and Carla Spletter is aristocratic as Annina, but the conducting is stodgy and the dialogue goes on forever. You can either cope with Third Reich recordings or you can’t. Here, the quality of the performance doesn’t justify its release.
The rest, however, are very different. They derive from the famous Saturday matine Met broadcasts at a time when the company – made up of the United States’s best singers and exiled legends who had fled Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin – was at its peak. Operatic tradition, under attack in Europe, was fiercely defended on the other side of the Atlantic. The artists’ commitment is breathtaking and you get an excitement that no studio recording could generate. This is what music, and opera in particular, is all about.
The urgency of contemporary political events clearly turned a potentially good performance of La Fille du Regiment, in the winter of 1940, into a great one. France had fallen, and when Lily Pons, as the regimental mascot Marie, launches into her barnstorming final aria, the audience goes berserk. The much criticised Pons was a wonderful comedienne, and coloratura has rarely been as stunning as it is here. Salvatore Baccaloni is a hilarious dirty old man as Sergeant Sulpice. Raoul Jobin is a touching Tonio, while Ira Pettine’s Marquise de Birkenfeld sounds like Lady Bracknell on speed.
The Tales of Hofmann is most notable for Lawrence Tibbett, the century’s greatest baritone, definitive as the four manifestations of Hofmann’s demonic alter ego. Ren Maison, as Hofmann, gets the character’s unnerving ambiguity absolutely right. Vina Bovy sharply differentiates the four female stereotypes – automaton, whore, victimised waif and camp diva – that haunt his imagination.
Bruno Walter’s 1942 Don Giovanni, the stuff of legend, has never been bettered. Walter catches every emotional flicker and moral nuance of Mozart’s score. The Met’s two great rival basses, Ezio Pinza and Alexander Kipnis, make the best Giovanni and Leporello imaginable. Rose Bampton’s Anna is a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Jarmila Novotna’s Elvira is fiery and vulnerable. An unmissable reissue.
Erich Leinsdor’s reputation as a variable Wagnerian derives from his rather stolid studio recordings. Live, it was a different story: his Tristan is wonderfully paced. Lauritz Melchior is the best tenor you will ever hear in Wagner. Helen Traubel, the Met’s rival to the legendary Kirsten Flagstad’s Isolde, is all rage and passion, funking one top C, otherwise steady as a rock.
The Faust and Alceste, though not in the same league, are worth having. Gluck’s masterpiece finds Bampton paired with Maison. Although she apparently took over the performance at short notice, she’s wonderfully vivid. Maison is in beautiful voice and Ettore Panizza conducts perfectly.
Gounod’s warhorse is a two-man show with Pinza fabulous as Mephistopheles, and the young Leonard Warren an excellent Valentin. Pelleter drives it too hard, though, and Richard Crooks’s Faust is passionless. Helen Jepson is weak as Marguerite, though the audience goes wild for her. The excitement that she was capable of generating live didn’t, it seems, transfer to disc.