Veteran Nicola Moscona here bows out after a twenty-five-year Met career as a weighty, sonorous, slightly rocky Raimondo.
Met stalwart Frank Guarrera’s sturdy baritone provides thrilling top notes and plenty of volume but also a fairly pronounced beat and some intermittent unsteadiness where we really need a smoother line of the kind Milnes or Panerai offer. There are more elegant portrayals of Edgardo than Richard Tucker’s, but his verve, vocal solidity and commitment are not in doubt and he at least has the clarion volume to match Sutherland in their duets. Given that Andrew Rose has remastered it into Ambient Stereo, the only disadvantages reside in the bronchial audience, hacking and sneezing for example through the lovely harp solo introduction to “Regnava nel silenzio”, and the standard cuts of that era: in Act 1, the repeat of Enrico’s “La pietade in suo favore” has gone, the close of Act 2 is truncated by the snipping of the remainder of his duet with Lucia, and of course there is no Wolf’s Crag scene opening Act 3 overall we lose over twenty minutes of music compared with Sutherland’s 1971 studio recording for Decca with a stellar cast. This live radio broadcast, in excellent sound rendered even better by the usual Pristine treatment, catches her on the wing in one of her five Met performances accompanied by a strong cast and excellent, flexible energised conducting from a young Silvio Varviso.
live radio broadcast, 9 December 1961, Metropolitan Opera, New York.įollowing her sensational debut as Lucia at Covent Garden in 1959, Joan Sutherland toured and conquered the world, in typically modest fashion, with the role she sang most often during her career – 233 times, according to Decca - and with which, alongside Callas, she set a standard to which her successors still aspire. Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus/Silvio Varviso Lucia di Lammermoor - Dramma tragico in tre atti
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