Giordano: Andrea Chénier – Tebaldi

Sound engineers working for Cetra in the early 1950s did not have a reputation for coddling posterity, so the first surprise here is how well this transfer breathes. The strings have air. The climaxes — and Andrea Chénier has more climaxes per square inch of score than almost any verismo opera you can name — don’t collapse into that shrill mono smear we’ve learned to tolerate as the price of hearing singers born a century ago. Someone at the transfer desk cared. The bass is thin, true, but everything above it has body, and Giordano’s crowded orchestration, which can turn to sludge in lesser restorations, comes through with real definition. For 1953, this is close to a small miracle.

Which makes it all the more maddening that the rest of the package doesn’t rise to the occasion.

The booklet pads itself shamelessly, reprinting Illica’s stage directions at three or four times the length of the actual sung text, as if bulk could substitute for substance, while offering almost nothing on the singers themselves. José Soler gets a single sentence of biography, essentially just birth and death dates fished out of some corner of the internet. For a tenor carrying the title role in a set built, presumably, to attract serious collectors, this is an odd kind of contempt.

And Soler needs the help. There’s an appealing gleam on certain top notes. He doesn’t flinch from the tessitura, which sits high and stays there. But descend into the middle voice and the sound goes patchy, almost apologetic, and the bottom all but disappears. Characterization is minimal; he sings the notes Giordano wrote without much sense of who Chénier actually is, poet, revolutionary, doomed romantic idealist walking to the scaffold reciting Gilbert. “Come un bel dì di maggio” wants poise and a certain wounded nostalgia, think of Corelli, di Stefano, even the young Domingo, and Soler gives you competent tone and little else. Worse, in the final duet Tebaldi so thoroughly outclasses him that the scene stops sounding like two condemned lovers meeting death together and starts sounding like a master class, the diva demonstrating line and color while the pupil tries gamely to keep up.

Ugo Savarese’s Gérard fares rather better. He’d already sung Germont on that infamous Callas/Cetra Traviata, a set nobody defends except for Callas, and here, with more vocal material to work with, he’s a more persuasive theatrical presence, snarling and simmering through Gérard’s early scenes with real menace. But when the character’s big confrontation arrives, the Scarpia-esque outburst of “Nemico della patria,” Savarese resorts to barking, pushing a voice that isn’t naturally large past its comfortable limits. He gets swamped by the orchestra more than either of his colleagues. It’s a serviceable reading, not a great one, useful evidence of a working Italian baritone of the period, nothing more.

Everywhere else the casting is exactly what you’d expect from an Italian house in 1953 tackling repertory it had performed constantly for half a century. The comprimario roles, of which Chénier has an unusual abundance, are handled with total idiomatic assurance even when the individual voices aren’t especially luminous. Nobody sounds lost. Everybody knows the tradition cold.

But we all know why this recording keeps resurfacing on reissue labels, and her name is Renata Tebaldi.

She’d already sung Maddalena for nine years by 1953 and would go on singing her, eighty-eight stage performances, eventually a second studio recording for Decca in 1957, so by this point the role sat in her voice like a favorite dress. Giordano gives her little of interest early on. “Eravate possente” is dramatically inert music, frankly, and Tebaldi sounds faintly restless with it, as if she knows the good material is still ahead. It is. “La mamma morta” is where this disc earns its keep, and where, I’ll say it plainly, Tebaldi surpasses Callas’s more famous recording of the same aria.

That’s not a comparison to make lightly, given how thoroughly “La mamma morta” has become Callas territory in the popular imagination (Philadelphia audiences of a certain age still swear the ceiling lifted). But context matters. Callas and Serafin were cutting an aria in isolation, a single track on a recital disc. Tebaldi and her maestro Arturo Basile are performing inside the drama, and it shows. Listen to “E Bersi, buona e pura, di sua bellezza ha fatto un mercato, un contratto per me!” Tebaldi finds the specific horror and self-disgust in those words, while Callas, superb as ever in sheer vocal address, gives you eloquence without quite that particularity. Tebaldi and Basile also pace the aria’s long arch more patiently, building toward the climax with a kind of banked heat rather than firing everything at once, so that the final phrases land with tremendous, almost physical impact.

Basile deserves real credit here. His conducting has the same unforced flexibility I admired in his Fonit Cetra Tosca, that instinct for knowing exactly when a phrase needs to breathe and when to keep the line taut. The little chorus “O pastorelle addio!” is a small thing, easily thrown away, but he shapes it with genuine tenderness, never letting the tempo droop into sentimentality.

So: a genuinely fine, at times extraordinary, Tebaldi performance, beautifully