From: chrisi@lloyd.Camex.COM (Chris Ischay)
Subject: Live recordings (was Re: Immortal opera recordings)
Organization: Camex Inc., Boston MA
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1992 22:41:25 EDT

In article <Bsu25G.1Hy@news.udel.edu> conrad@brahms.udel.edu (Jon Conrad)
writes:

>It's time to confess:  I began this topic partly (maybe mostly) to see
>if we agree how FEW of the great opera recordings are free from
>(sometimes substantial flaws).

I thought as much.  It's the teacher in you.  And it worked.  I kept
racking my brains for recordings you'd let pass.  So I had to leave out all
my beloved Gigli recordings -- just because the damn soprano can't sing in
tune.

>  (There was one respondent
>who turned it into a list of "my favorite opera recordings,"

More precisely, it was a long list of "desert island" recordings.  I
believe the list you mention would have been much longer.  %^)

>I hope nobody sees this as a nasty bit of trickery.

Oh yeah sure right.  

>On the live-vs.-studio recording issue, I stand unrepentant.  Yes, I
>want a performance to have "pizazz."  But I have not found that this is
>a quality that automatically arises in live performance, or is always
>absent in the recording studio.

No need to repent.  Your position is not sinful.

But I'd like to hear a little more from others about their experiences of
live recordings (is there a less oxymoronic way to say that?).  They don't
get discussed very much in this newsgroup, and I believe there's a wealth
of exciting music out there, albeit surrounded by a lot of dreck and bad
recording quality.

I certainly agree that "pizzazz" is not axiomatically produced by any set
of circumstances.  I am now working my way through the Solti Ring (for the
first time).  Wow.  Now *that's* got pizzazz aplenty.  But it seems to me
really designed as an at-home theatre-of-the-mind kind of recording, not in
any way an attempt to give a "stagey" feel.

And there are any number of exceedingly beautiful studio recordings.  But.
And I mean But.  There's a special something that I often hear in live
recordings that's missing at thestudio.  Maybe it's an extension of the
feeling I get listening to the Texaco matinee broadcasts, that this music
is really happening, *just* as I hear it.  Not doctored.  Not redone.

Singers sound a little flukey sometimes at the beginning, and then their
voices really open up.  And they sound a little tired at the end.  But as
the drama builds, so does the intensity.  Sometimes.  Not always.  And
certainly not all live recordings are worth even listening to.

I'll just mention one recent example for me and then quit.  I just found a
recording of Norma with Zinka Milanov, Jennie Tourel, Frederick Jagel and
Norman Cordon.  Oh, and Thelma Votipka is Clotilde.  These are all familiar
names.  Up till now I've only known this work through the first Callas
recording.  And while I admire her singing, everyone else's drives me up a
wall.  Or at least the men's.  The total effect has been that I've listened
to it maybe 4-6 times and not really felt the magic and the power of the
drama, nor even the beauty of some of the music.  It just didn't get under
my skin.

Until I heard this recording from 1944, conducted by Cesare Sodero.  His
pace is positively incendiary.  The stage feels electric with excitement.
Milanov is utterly convincing.  There are moments when I think, "Now *this*
is the way Norma should sound."  Then she hits the florid spots and she kind
of poops out a bit.  She just doesn't do them much -- better than doing
them poorly, I suppose.  And on some of the big notes she kind of yells
her way up to them, unless she's going to deliver one of her "floaters."  

The real surprise is Jennie Tourel, who is new to me.  She seems to me a
perfect Adalgisa.  In fact, the thing I liked most about this performance
is that they all seemed like real people, where somehow in the Callas
recording people sound sort of stiff and formulary, making the whole thing
kind of an old-fashioned lofty bel canto novelty.  In the recording I'm
talking about, it's every bit as passionate and involving as something
like, say, Traviata.

Frederick Jagel is among the best tenors I've heard.  I think today he
would rival Domingo in that repertoire.  I have a feeling that Pollione
wants to have a lighter, more flexible, and less baritonal quality.
Something like perhaps Alessandro Bonci or today Rockwell Blake.  Perhaps
someone can comment on the various tenor sounds and what Bellini might have
expected.  

I don't mean to wander from the point.  This live recording has let me turn
the corner with Norma in a way that the most touted studio recording
hasn't.  Live recordings are interesting documents and a valuable part of
the legacy of recording.  And something I'd like to learn more about.

Chris Ischay
chrisi@camex.com
(note: my address has changed)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical