Giuseppe VerdiUN BALLO IN MASCHERA (1859)
NBC Symphony Orchestra
Robert Shaw Chorale
Arturo Toscanini (conductor)
Recorded live at Carnegie Hall, New York, 1954
Pristine Classical PACO032 remastering
Published 2009
FLAC, cuesheets, scans
Rob Maynard, MusicWeb International Review:
It is a never-ending source of wonder to find modern audio technology giving new life to recordings originally made many decades ago. The best technicians – usually those with a strong musical background - can remove not only clicks, crackles and pops but, indeed, the whole opaque fuzziness that we had always assumed to be inherent in “primitive” recording processes. And now, thanks to the application of even more advanced technologies, we can hear sounds that, while certainly captured at the time of the original recording, have never since – thanks to relatively poor playback mechanisms – been suspected to have been there at all...And now I have in front of me Pristine Audio’s reissue of Toscanini’s incandescent account of Ballo, originally recorded over two sessions in January 1954 and newly remastered in the “XR” process...
The sheer urgency with which Toscanini drives the NBC Symphony Orchestra is tremendous – and must have been tremendously challenging – but the players respond as if their lives depended on it - their careers quite possibly did. Thanks to the survival of a great deal of filmed material, notably the famous pioneering “TV concerts” of the late 1940s, we are quite familiar with the conductor’s baton technique and, as one listens to these discs, it is quite easy in the mind’s eye to see him slashing away with a degree of energy more appropriate to a man half his age. XR technology successfully and strikingly uncovers a great deal of orchestral detail – notably among some especially plangent woodwinds – that has hitherto remained largely hidden...
Here the conductor has assembled a strong and dependable vocal team, many of whom – Nelli, Peerce, Moscona, Scott – he worked with repeatedly in this final stage of his career. It is, if you like, a sort of “in-house” company and, as such, the various voices here are well known, though, with XR’s apparent ability to draw the ear to sounds that can, no matter how familiar you are with previous incarnations of this recording, come as something of a surprise, Nelli’s voice emerges here as notably stronger in its lower registers. As her noble paramour, Jan Peerce, never the most subtle of singers, delivers a forthright account fully in accordance with Toscanini’s high voltage approach: the Act 2 love duet between Riccardo and Amelia, Teco io sto, is a real show-stopper and an undoubted highlight of the whole performance.
Jan Peerce (Riccardo),
Herva Nelli (Amelia),
Robert Merrill (Renato),
Claramae Turner (Ulrica),
Virginia Haskins (Oscar),
George Cehanovsky (Silvano),
Nicola Moscona (Samuel),
Norman Scott (Tom),
John Carmen Rossi (Judge, Servant of Amelia)
NBC Symphony Orchestra
Robert Shaw Chorale
conducted by Arturo Toscanini
Recorded live at Carnegie Hall, 17th January 1954 (Act 1)
and 24th January 1954 (Acts II and III)
Transfer from Air Check discs "presented by the makers of MobilGas and MobilOil"
No catalogue numbers, matrix numbers E4RP8241-6
Discs provided from the private collection of Christophe Pizzutti
Discs provided from the private collection of Christophe Pizzutti