You’ll buy this for the rare Leonora of otherwise-known-as-Wagnerian soprano Astrid Varnay, and you’ll get an exciting performance of this opera as a bonus. It certainly doesn’t displace any truly great reading on disc, but it’s surprisingly effective. The chorus is lousy and the orchestra, while better, is nowhere near first class, but there are some splendid surprises.
First is Walter Herbert’s incisive conducting–tense, quick-but-controlled, filled with the opera’s inherent melodrama and avoiding the oom-pah-pah aspects of the score. Least appealing of the soloists is the always appalling yet rock-solid Kurt Baum as Manrico, noisy as a train and incapable of tenderness or elegance (though he tries a little in the final scene with Azucena)–but he’s heroic and, in his own truck-driver way, very exciting. Robert Weede’s di Luna is a beautiful, musical creation, lacking only a genuinely silky, Italianate legato. Fedora Barbieri’s Azucena is nothing short of epic, perhaps the finest of the many excellent Azucenas on CD. The voice is huge and secure and she truly sounds nuts–just listen to her anguished, repeated cry of “Il figlio mio” in her second-act narration and you’ll have nightmares for a week. Her final scene is stunning too.
And Varnay? Well, the voice, the tone itself never is truly Italian-lush-and-lovely, but she sings the role wonderfully, with a real trill, true agility, soft high notes, and superb musicianship. Her last-act duet with di Luna is one of the most vivid and fluid you’ll ever hear (a brief stage-pit glitch notwithstanding)–but she sounds out of her Fach. By 1952 she already had begun to ease out of her Italian roles (Lady Macbeth, Aida, Gioconda) and concentrate on Wagner, and although we respect and can be moved by her Leonora, her decision to go Wagnerian clearly was correct. The Ferrando is pretty good. The recorded sound is as bad as the chorus, but you can hear everything. The overall effect of this set is pretty satisfying despite it all, and Varnayites will have to have it–but it wouldn’t quite be Verdi’s ideal cast.
