It’s time to add more legends to my Mixcloud site: Mario Del Monaco, Raina Kabaivanska, and Tito Gobbi star in this 1962 performance of Otello from Covent Garden led by Georg Solti. 

Del Monaco, never one for subtlety, enters at full speed with perhaps the most secure “Esultate!” I’ve ever heard.  His career spanned the globe, singing often with the greatest divas of his time such as Zinka Milanov, Renata Tebaldi (both were signed to Decca Records, for which they made several recordings), and Maria Callas (he was her Pollione when they opened La Scala in 1955 and at her Met debut).

Between 1950 and 1959 he chalked up nearly 150 Met performances in the dramatic tenor repertoire.  It is said he sang Otello 457 times in his career, which lasted till 1975.

Kabaivanska, unfortunately, made few commercial recordings (there were a few recital discs released on RCA LPs which apparently never made it to the digital domain), but was a regular visitor to the Met from 1964 (debuting as Nedda) till a final Tatiana in Eugene Onegin in 1978.  A personal highlight for me was her Lisa in the company’s first Russian-language performances of Pique Dame opposite Nicolai Gedda in 1972.

A stunning woman known for her committed acting, she also possesses one of those unique voices, recognizable in a single phrase, of which both aspects are preserved on a DVD of Tosca with Plácido Domingo and Sherrill Milnes from 1976.  She specialized in Puccini and verismo works such as Francesca da Rimini.  In 2001, at the age of 66, her career took a twist with a new role: Liza Elliott in Kurt Weill’s Lady in the Dark at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo (sung in something resembling English: “Uxley vants to make his buk on me”).

Gobbi is likely the most significant Scarpia of the 20th century and claimed to have sung the role nearly 1,000 times, recording it twice with Callas, a close friend and frequent collaborator.  It served as his Met debut in 1956 with Milanov and Giuseppe Di Stefano, as well as his farewell to the company as a singer in 1975 with Dorothy Kirsten and John Alexander; he returned in 1978 to restage Otto Schenk’s 1968 production of Tosca.

His career actually began in the early 1930s in Italy’s provincial houses.  Over the next three decades he would graduate to the world’s main stages in roles as diverse as Don Giovanni, Simon BOccanegra, and Wozzeck (sung in Italian).  In addition to Scarpia, his later career focused on Jago and Falstaff.  Gobbi appeared in about 25 Italian films in both singing and dramatic roles, and began his third career as a stage director in the 1960s.

At the time of this performance, Solti, as music director of the Covent Garden Opera Company, was instrumental in having the company renamed the Royal Opera and gradually did away with the practice of all performances being sung in English.  A little-known fact about the maestro is his presence in the Guinness Book of World Records: he holds the record for the most Grammy Awards won (31 out of 74 nominations, plus a special lifetime achievement award).

Giuseppe Verdi: Otello

Royal Opera, Covent Garden
Georg Solti, conductor
30 June 1962

Otello – Mario Del Monaco
Desdemona – Raina Kabaivanska
Jago – Tito Gobbi
Emilia – Josephine Veasey
Cassio – John Lanigan
Roderigo – John Dobson
Lodovico – David Ward
Montano – Forbes Robinson
Un aroldo – Glynne Thomas

If you’re not in the mood for Shakespearean tragedy, you may enjoy a charming, fun performance of L’elisir d’amore from a broadcast last week from Wiener Staatsoper starring Stephen Costello, Valentina Nafortina, and Erwin Schrott as a scenery-chewing Dulcamara.  I know Costello has had his detractors at Parterre, but within an hour after I posted the performance, someone left the comment, “It’s so good to hear Stephen Costello back in form as he was at the last Tucker Gala.”  As always, click on: https://www.mixcloud.com/Jungfer_Marianne_Leizmetzerin/