Search - Verdi, Schock, Metternich :: Rigoletto

Another musical miracle under the baton of Ferenc Fricsay

RENS | Dover, NH USA | 09/18/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Today we assume that an opera is to be sung in its original language even if the audience hasn't the slightest understanding of it. Indeed, most managements now supply supertitles to keep the audience informed of the text. And I find this quite useful and acceptable. But what I no longer champion is the necessity of singing an opera in its original language rather than in the language of the audience. Not after hearing Fricsay's 1950 Rigoletto and his 1953 Lucia. Add to that Kraus's 1953 Munich Tosca and Kubelik's 1955 Vienna Aida. All of these performancs were sung in German but none of them perpetuated the pre-War approach of cloaking Verdi with a Wagnerian mantel. Each of these recordings documents a performance presented in a recognizably Italianate and Verdian style. Each of them brought into play first rank singers at their finest, such as Schock, Streich, and Metternich in this Rigoletto. Fricsay clearly knew the members of his orchestra well and therefore knew how to draw magnificent playing from them, and he seems to have known how to collaborate with the singers rather than merely accompany them or, worse, dictate to them.



Of course this performance, however well done and deeply moving, should not be one's first or only recording of Rigoletto, but for any one who loves insightful conducting, first rate orchestral playing, great singing, and the operas of Verdi really should hear this recording. The mono sound, by the way, is very clear and full in range. One could easily believe that the performance was taped five or ten years later than it was.



Fricsay's death in 1963, just as he turned 49, was and remains a major loss to Western classical music. We are fortunate that his talent was recognzied early and that we can enjoy an unusually generous legacy of recordings, operatic and orchestral, made in the last three or four years of his life. His Berlin Verdi Requiem and Beethoven Ninth remain among the finest recordings ever made of these two masterpieces - and by some gift of grace both recordings are still available. I recommend that a reader of this review do a search on "Fricsay" on Amazon. The number of his recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Berlin State Opera, and "his" orchestra, RIAS Berlin, is astonishing, and his mastery of the styles of Mozart, Haydn, or Beethoven as well as of Verdi and Tchaikovsky or of Stravinsky and Shostakovich,among many others, demonstrates musical genius of the highest order.



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