Giuseppe Giacomini

This John Dexter production was premiered in 1975 and filmed in 1984. The incomparable Leontyne Price delivered a series of unforgettable performances as Leonora, imprinting the role with the uniqueness of her voice and her superlative acting. James Levine's conducting was hailed by The New York Times for being "full of drive and fire" with "the grandeur of the magnificent score coming through."

Verdi’s Requiem is a work of white-hot dramatic intensity, infused with his lifetime of composing opera. His approach to religion is explosive, emotional, and full of temperament and fear, the latter being wonderfully conveyed by López-Cobos in this concert performance.

Chenier was the role with which Del Monaco changed singing by introducing a technique taught by Arturo Melocchi, based on singing with the larynx kept low, at the bottom of the neck. It gave Del Monaco a powerful, brassy, thick, muscular, penetrating sound.
In March 1949 Del Monaco sang Chenier at La Scala. His performances excited the public and marked a changing of the guard. Gigli sang his final Scala performances in 1947, as Chenier. His object and that of the tenors he influenced was, above all, to caress you. Del Monaco's was to excite you.

This 1979 Norma features Renata Scotto in one of her very best recordings. She is in gorgeous vocal estate, with much exquisite pianissimo singing above the stave. Surprisingly, Scotto is one of the few native Italians to essay this most difficult bel canto role, and she brings an innate understanding of the text and music .

Don’t judge this album from the first aria – the Puccini arias are the weakest here. The French repertoire finds Kaufmann on excellent form. The most encouraging thing about him is his musical intelligence – a genuine soft high note to crown his Carmen Flower Song – and elsewhere he strives to serve the music. The voice can’t quite do all he asks yet, but it’s full of brooding, Vinay-like darkness.

What does it say that of the six available videos of this opera, the two best were made in 1958 and 1978? Something about the Verdian style and grand Verdi voices, I'm sure, but I'll leave the details to you. The Price/Giacomini performance from the Met is a pretty boring affair, the Urmana/Giordani perfectly acceptable but thrill-free, and the Gorchakova/Gergiev/St. Petersburg original version is both in another class and not particularly idiomatic. Both Hardy DVDs–the '58 from Naples with Tebaldi and Corelli, and this one, from La Scala in 1978, present the opera as the "real thing"..

–Robert Levine

Rave reviews have garnished Jonas Kaufmann’s career the last few years. Listening to his first recital disc, due for release on 14 January 2008, the day of his first Alfredo at Covent Garden, it is easy to see why. With film-star looks to match he seems predestined for great things. He has the classy Prague Philharmonic backing him, conducted by one of the more sought after Italian opera conductors of the younger generation.

In his 2007 production for the Maggio Musicale in Florence, French opera director Nicolas Joël – named as the next director of the Opéra de Paris from 2009 – presented his reading of Giuseppe Verdi’s La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny). An adventure story and a tale of grim pursuit and unrelenting misfortune, of faith, renunciation and - fi nally - death and forgiveness, Verdi’s La forza del destino is, like an operatic road movie, also a portrait gallery of the different places and curious people the main players meet along their way.

Verdi’s Requiem is a work of white-hot dramatic intensity, infused with his lifetime of composing opera. His approach to religion is explosive, emotional, and full of temperament and fear, the latter being wonderfully conveyed by López-Cobos in this concert performance.

This is a tremendously enjoyable production of an opera that can be difficult to bring off. La forza del destino is so epic that it runs the risk of sprawling, and if the performers and the stage director don’t exercise self-discipline, the opera quickly loses its focus. I don’t think anyone will argue that this is the best-sung performance that he or she ever heard—in spite of its difficulties, there are many good audio-only recordings of this opera—but this is one of those times when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The last time I reviewed a DVD of this opera in these pages, it was a version dating from 1983 from the Metropolitan Opera, with Leontyne Price, Giuseppe Giacomini, and Leo Nucci in the lead roles… Raymond Tuttle