Verdi: Don Carlo.(Sound Recording Review)

Martinpelto, Tobiason; Cleveman, Mattei, Ryhanen, Rundgren, Wallen; Chorus and Orchestra of Royal Opera House Stockholm, Hold-Garrido. Italian text only. Naxos 8.660096-98 (3)

The budget-priced opera recordings on the Naxos label are a valiant attempt to offer affordable performances of basic repertoire that can stand comparison with full-price releases. There have been some real successes, Wozzeck and Fidelio among them, but the situation with Don Carlo is more complex. Naxos offers a five-act version, in Italian translation, but the materials chosen from the various sources are not the same as on any other recording. The major surprise here is a large section of Verdi's original 1867 grand finale--which includes not only a third appearance by the Grand Inquisitor but a male chorus as well--appended to the first part of the revised 1884 finale. We also get the original opening of Act III, in which Elisabetta and Eboli exchange masks (though with a cut of the first part of the offstage chorus), which to my knowledge has never been recorded in Italian, and the original finale of Act IV (again, with a cut). It's an honest attempt by Royal Swedish Opera to come up with a dramatically viable edition, but there is a real question of whether it makes sense to include music that Verdi jettisoned over the years when some of the music he always retained is cut. There is no second verse to Rodrigo's "Carlo, ch'e sol il nostro amore" or Elisabetta's romance, no march in the auto-da-fe scene, and most indefensibly there is a cut of the first appearance of the "L'ora fatale e suonata" motive in Act I. Unlike Antonio Pappano's unique performing version, available on EMI CD (56152) and DVD (D2031), which gives the impression that the material was selected to suit the particular cast at hand and plays as a single great work, the overall effect here is not so much a misrepresentation of what sort of opera Don Carlo is--there are far too many competing materials to say that Don Carlo is any one kind of opera--as a neither-here-nor-there proposition.

More's the pity, since conductor Alberto Hold-Garrido has a genuine affinity for Don Carlo. Given the choice of Italian text for this production, he rightly ...