Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Verdi: Ernani

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host, Keith Brown, writes:

I broadcast a classic old recording of this Giuseppe Verdi's fifth opera from 1844 on Sunday, November 9th of last year. It was taped live in performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, December 1, 1962. Sony Classical has been issuing in digitally upgraded sound and in CD format a series of airtapes of radio broadcasts derived from the Met's archives. These tapes preserve for posterity the voices of operatic greats in the Golden Age of opera singing. Well, why present another old classic recording of Ernani from that era so soon again? Because the Sony release suffers from drastic cuts to its musical numbers. Verdi lovers deserve to hear Ernani in its entirety as Verdi wrote it.

There's an RCA stereo LP release of Ernani from 1968 that is musically complete, and is similar on several counts to the Met's 1962 taping. Again, Thomas Schippers is on the podium, only this time he's conducting the RCA Italiana Opera Orchestra and Chorus. Again, tenor Carlo Bergonzi takes the title role as the Spanish outlaw nobleman Don Juan of Aragon, aka Ernani. Again, soprano Leontyne Price is heard opposite Bergonzi as Donna Elvira, Ernani's truelove. The RCA recording was a production of RCA Italiana studios, Rome.