Verdi Tribute – Historic Recordings 1914-1962

Somebody in Vienna clearly spent an evening with a stack of shellac and no particular plan, and the result — for better and occasionally worse — is a scrapbook that only Verdi himself could have assembled with such promiscuous generosity. There is no unifying thread here except the man’s genius, which turns out to be thread enough.

Start with the obvious treasures, because there is no point being coy about them. Caruso and Titta Ruffo tearing into the Otello duet still raises the hair on the back of the neck — two Italian voices of such opposite grain, one golden and covered, the other brazen as a trumpet, that the friction alone tells you everything about Iago’s poison working on the Moor. Ponselle and Pinza in the La forza del destino duet, from 1928 of all vintages, come up astonishingly vivid — you can practically hear the rosin on Pinza’s low notes, and Ponselle’s tone has that plush, velvet-curtain warmth that made contemporaries wonder if she hadn’t been sent from some more generous century.

Then there is Leonard Warren, heard twice, and this is where the disc gets genuinely interesting rather than merely comforting. In the Rigoletto quartet — “Bella figlia dell’amore,” from the 1950 complete release — Warren is in his imperial prime, that huge covered baritone sitting rock-solid under Zinka Milanov’s and whoever else is up there in a texture Verdi wrote to sound like four minds arguing at once and somehow agreeing on the tune. But go back to the Macbeth aria and you meet a different animal entirely: a younger Warren, tone not yet fully settled into that famous bronze column, with a faint constriction in the middle voice that would vanish within a few years. Whoever dated this to the Leinsdorf studio sessions or a broadcast from that era got it wrong — the top A gleams, free and thrilling, exactly as legend has it, but the surrounding tone gives the game away. This is an earlier document, and a fascinating one, of a voice still becoming itself.

The transfers are what they are. 1914 to 1962 is a long stretch of recording history, and nobody should expect the surface noise on the earliest sides to vanish through wishful thinking. It doesn’t. But there’s a strange pleasure in hearing Verdi’s own century of interpreters — some who might plausibly have absorbed performing traditions from musicians who knew the composer — jostling up against singers who lived into the LP age.

Gobbi’s “Pari siamo” is a small master class in itself — that snarling, chest-voice sneer on “son forse brutto,” the sudden collapse into something almost tender. Nobody has ever quite matched him for making Rigoletto‘s self-loathing sound like it’s eating him alive in real time. Callas’s “Sempre libera,” taken from her lone complete studio Traviata for Cetra, is leaner and more brilliant than her later live performances — the trills aren’t perfect, they never quite were, but the character is fully inhabited already, restless and doomed.

And then, a genuine discovery for anyone who doesn’t already collect this repertoire obsessively: the young Joan Sutherland in “Mercè, dilette amiche” from I vespri siciliani, tossed off with a freshness and技 — no, let me just say technical ease — that makes you understand immediately why Serafin heard something extraordinary in her years before Callas’s shadow made everyone forget she could sing anything but bel canto vehicles for her own voice alone.

The Björling-Merrill Don Carlo duet needs no defending; it is simply one of the great friendship duets on record, two voices of comparable steel and warmth locking together in thirds like they’d rehearsed it their whole careers, which in a sense they had. And the 1939 “Plebe! Patrizi! Popolo!” with Lawrence Tibbett, Rose Bampton, and Giovanni Martinelli remains a small miracle of ensemble singing from an era when the Met could apparently field a Simon Boccanegra cast like this without breaking a sweat.

Is this the way to introduce anyone to Verdi? No. Buy a proper complete Otello or Rigoletto for that. But as a bicentenary bouquet, gathered without much scholarly rigor and with zero discographic annotation worth trusting, it is nonetheless full of the real thing — voices that don’t exist anymore, singing music that never gets old. Documentation be damned; the singing carries it.