Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Verdi: Falstaff

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

We begin lyric theater programming for the year 2020 with one of the greatest of all operatic comedies. Falstaff (1893) is a marvelous finale to Giuseppe Verdi's career as an opera composer. He regarded it fondly as a labor of love. With an excellent libretto by Arrigo Boito to work from, Verdi handled the dramatic aspects of Shakespeare's comedy with a mastery unparalleled in anything he had previously written.

I have previously broadcast two compact disc releases of Falstaff, and a vintage LP release, too. The 1994 Sony Classical CD release came on Sunday, April 30,1995. Baritone Juan Pons starred as the fat knight, with Riccardo Muti conducting the orchestra and chorus of the famed La Scala opera house in Milan. (A recording made live in performance in June of 1993.) Then on Sunday, February 5, 2005 came the LSO Live CD issue, this recording also made live in performance at The Barbican in London in May of 2004. Baritone Michele Pertusi portrayed the ageing reprobate nobleman. Sir Colin Davis was on the podium leading the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. In our WWUH classical music record library there's an old recording of Falstaff on Angel monaural LPs. It was taped at London's Kingsway Hall in 1956 with Herbert von Karajan directing the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus and the members of what was billed as the Philharmonia Opera Company. The star singer in this studio recording was the incomparable Tito Gobbi, arguably the greatest Italian operatic baritone of the twentieth century. Those Angel LPs I drew upon for broadcast on Sunday, October 7, 2007. The supporting cast here also consisted of operatic luminaries of the mid twentieth century: Rolando Panerai, Luigi Alva, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, and Anna Moffo.

The German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was one of the single most recorded voices in the history of recorded sound. He undertook the role of Falstaff for a production of Verdi's masterpiece staged by the Vienna State Opera in 1966. At the artistic helm of the production was America's star conductor/composer, Leonard Bernstein, leading the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus of the Vienna Staatsoper. The critics raved about Bernstein's sprightly and concise interpretation of the score. The cast for this Viennese staging could hardly be bettered, all of them eminent vocal artists of the 1950s and 60s such as Regina Resnik, Graziella Sciutti, Rolando Panerai again, Hilde Rossl-Majdan, Erich Kunz and Gerhard Stolze. The recording was released stateside on three Columbia Masterworks LPs in 1966.