Leontyne Price, Montserrat Caballé, Roberta Peters, Carlo Bergonzi, Richard Tucker and Franco Corelli headline the latest installment in the critically acclaimed series of Saturday afternoon broadcast recordings taken directly from the Metropolitan Opera’s archives. Freshly re-mastered from their original sources and available on CD for the first time, the series features some of the greatest singers ever to grace the Met stage.
Fans of Italian opera will welcome the four new recordings. Carlo Bergonzi is the love-struck Nemorino courting the flirty Adina of Roberta Peters in a 1966 performance of Donizetti’s bubbly bel canto comedy L’Elisir d’Amore conducted by the great Thomas Schippers.
Schippers also conducts two marvelously melodic operas from Verdi’s early and middle periods. Ernani, an 1844 work, is a showcase for tenor and this new recording features Carlo Bergonzi (arguably the greatest of all Verdi tenors) and a radiant-voiced Leontyne Price. Baritone Cornell MacNeil (another Verdi stalwart) and bass Giorgio Tozzi round out the cast in this sizzling performance from 1962.
Luisa Miller is one of Verdi’s greatest heroines and a signature role for Montserrat Caballé, who is heard early in her career on this 1968 recording. Tenor Richard Tucker is her Rodolfo and Sherrill Milnes, one of the great post-Leonard Warren era baritones, sings the role of her father.
The raw emotion that makes verismo opera so thrilling drives this 1964 double bill of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci conducted by Nello Santi. Soprano Eileen Farrell and Richard Tucker square off in Cavalleria Rusticana, Farrell’s last Met broadcast appearance. Franco Corelli never left anything on the stage either vocally or dramatically. Corelli’s performance of the tortured clown Canio in I Pagliacci is riveting and he’s ideally paired with Met favorite Lucine Amara.
Whatever your operatic preference may be, Ariama has every recording in this series on CD and in MP3 and Lossless downloads.
by Craig Zeichner, Ariama Editor
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