The Real Falstaff

The Maggio Musicale in Florence is the oldest and one of the most famous music festivals in Italy. When it’s director, Zubin Mehta, celebrated his 70th birthday, the staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff was part of the festivities. The opera was conducted by Zubin Mehta himself and directed by Luca Ronconi.

Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff – Tito Gobbi; Luigi Alva; Rolando Panerai; Elisabeth Schwartzkopf; Anna Moffo; Fedora Barbieri;
Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus; Herbert von Karajan
Classical | 2 CDs + Bonus CD | EAC Rip | 636 MB (3% recovery) | FLAC+LOG+Cue | Complete scans
Publisher: EMI Classics | Recorded: 19563 | Published: 2011

None of the Falstaff recordings that have come along subsequently – 15 are listed on the current Gramophone Database, not including videos – has come close to what Karajan and his hand-picked cast achieved in Kingsway Hall, London, in June 1956. It will surely prove difficult to surpass its particular combination of virtues. - Gramophone

Out of Giuseppe Verdi’s adoration for William Shakespeare three masterpieces were born : Macbeth, Otello and, as a musical testament, his only comedy Falstaff. But in accordance with its librettist Arrigo Boito’s wish to remove the original bourgeois farce The Merry Wives of Windsor out of the English mists and to warm it up to the clear Tuscan sun, Falstaff transforms Shakespeare’s morality play into an ode to life, to pleasure and to reconciliation that forgives human vices, rewards intelligence and virtue, and praises that spark of madnessthat gives life its flavour. Shakespeare’s most famous and subversive comic character has indeed proved to be a fertile ground for Verdi who, then eighty-years old, signed with Falstaff his most modern, most ambitious, but also wisest and ambiguous opera.

Sir Colin Davis’s eagerly anticipated recording of Verdi’s Otello is released on the 10th anniversary of the LSO Live label. Opera has always formed an important part of the label’s output – recording concert performances of opera allows listeners to enjoy the drama of a live performance without the problems associated with recording in a theatre.