![]() ![]() ![]() Stefania Toczyska’s Amneris is well-played, with plenty of nasty chest tones and ringing high notes it’s too bad the latter tend to fly sharp a good deal of the time. But rarely have I heard a singer hurl himself into the part with such venom and vigor–he’s simply terrifying in his third-act confrontation with Aida. Varady’s real-life husband, the great German Lieder baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, is our Amonasro, and he also has an un-Verdian voice. She has, I might add, absolutely everything else, and there are dozens of Italian sopranos I can think of who are less successful in the role than she. But to say that her Aida is in a class with Price’s or Caballé’s would be incorrect the timbre of Varady’s voice does not allow for the morbidezza and warmth of a true Verdian. ![]() Her training and intelligence are first rate, the voice is handsome rather than either plush or sensual, the registers are flawlessly even from top to bottom, and her control over dynamics is always admirable. In the title role we find the under-recorded, superb Hungarian-Romanian spinto Julia Varady, a singer who sang almost everything, and sang it well: Violetta, Donna Elvira, Elettra, Senta, Butterfly, Leonora (Forza and Trovatore), Santuzza, and Fiordiligi, to name several. But I’m being picky–this is the best of his available readings of the role, and in ’82 his golden tone could still startle with its beauty. He’s in magnificent, ringing voice here, turning in a particularly gorgeous, sensitive Tomb Scene and singing with emotional force and impeccable diction, but you occasionally get the impression that he’s overcompensating for his essentially lyric sound by singing as loudly as he can. Radames was not a role that played a huge part in Pavarotti’s career he sang it first (in San Francisco) just a year before this taping, and frankly, his sound never was quite as broad as it should have been to do the part justice. Here we have a bunch of great singers, an always interesting conductor, and a superb orchestra and chorus in repertoire that normally is identified with only one of the cast members, and even then somewhat marginally. ![]() This oddity from Berlin in 1982 is more than worth a listen. ![]()
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