Verdi: II Trovatore.

[] Frittoli, Urmana; Licitra, Nucci; La Scala Chorus and Orchestra, Muti. Text and translations. Sony Classical S2K 89553

Riccardo Muti's Il Trovatore caused a scandal when it opened La Scala's 2000-01 season. At Muti's behest, in "Di quella pira," Salvatore Licitra left out the traditional interpolated high Cs, setting off a volley of boos from the loggione.

The choice is characteristic of Muti's approach, which takes the written score as gospel and shuns traditional performance practice. The present recording, drawn from that Scala run, is note-complete, including the cabaletta repeats often omitted, all of them taken with minimal embellishment. In this freshly scrubbed Trovatore, there isn't a detail, instrumental or vocal, that doesn't bear the conductor's stamp. The Scala players achieve orchestral textures of breathtaking transparency and coloristic variety. The interpretation stands as a rebuke to the coarse routine that afflicts so many Trovatore performances, and as an attempt to restore the opera's sheer beauty.

In the process, though, Muti gives short shrift to the drama, as if Trovatore were a kind of tone poem with vocal lines. All too often, the wonderful work in the pit upstages what's happening onstage. Revealingly, Muti rushes through the brief recitative for Ferrando and di Luna before Azucena's entrance in Act III, Scene 1: it feels as if he were unable to countenance any passage that lacks abstract musical significance. His tight rein often stymies his singers and scants the opera's bursting-at-the-seams, full-blooded (and full-throated) romanticism.

Muti's interpretive stance is typified by his treatment of "Tacea la notte." At Leonora's rhapsodic line "Dolci s'udiro e flebili," where most conductors broaden the tempo emphatically, Muti slows down just a hair. This tactic lends the music undeniable forward sweep but robs it of its grandeur. And it prevents Barbara Frittoli from making a big interpretive effect: she's self-contained just where ...