Another missed opportunity
Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 09/18/2005
(3 out of 5 stars)
"Those of us who love the Rake keep being frustrated by new recordings--five in toto since the Eighties--in which things go hit-or-miss. There was a lot of promise here. McNair makes a very good, pure lyric anne, but then things go sour. Rolfe-Johnson is a wonderful tenor in the light English style, but he is twenty years too old for the part, and Ozawa conducts limply in many places. So far, nobody has surpassed the classic Sixties account on Sony with Stravinsky conducting a nearly perfect cast. Thank goodness we have it, since the recent recordings have turned out so disappointing: Gardiner, Chailly, Nagaon, and Craft among them."