It was a little over three months ago that I first started writing about recordings of the conductor John Barbirolli. At that time I referred to the Warner Classics release of Sir John Barbirolli: The Complete Warner Recordings as a chronicle of the very nature of recording classical music for the better part of the twentieth century. All of the sessions took place in Europe, and almost all of the albums involved performances in Great Britain. (The exceptions were recorded in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris and were discussed on this site at the beginning of last week.) In addition, I augmented my account of the recordings in this collection that had been remastered from 78 RPM recordings with the Sony Masterworks six-CD release of the recordings that Barbirolli made in the United States for both Columbia and RCA Victor.
The final category, which I shall now discuss, involves the operatic albums in the Warner collection. This includes three operas performed in their entirety, Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello. There is also a CD that consists primarily of Puccini duets from Manon Lescaut, La bohème, Tosca, and Butterfly, sung by soprano Leonora Lafayette and tenor Richard Lewis. There is a single CD devoted to instrumental selections from five operas by Richard Wagner: Tannhäuser, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (the master-singers of Nuremberg), Tristan und Isolde, Lohengrin, and The Flying Dutchman, as well as two CDs of instrumental selections from Italian opera and Viennese operettas.
The greatest disappointment is that the Purcell recording is not particularly “historically informed,” even with Raymond Leppard at the harpsichord providing continuo. However, this recording was made in 1965 and probably had more to do with featuring soprano Victoria de los Angeles and tenor Peter Glossop in the title roles (along with Heather Harper singing the part of Dido’s servant Belinda). Perhaps the brightest spot on the album comes with the sea shanty delivered at the beginning of the third act by tenor Robert Tear, whose reputation was just beginning its ascent.
As to the “grand” operas, I find that I very rarely come away from a staged performance of Butterfly that does not leave me squirming uneasily. My reaction to recordings is no better, as I recently discussed this past August when writing about a Decca recording by Herbert von Karajan. Ironically, the one exception I have experienced took place in the fall of 2016, when Jun Kaneko (born in Japan and now living in Nebraska) provided the designs for the most recent production of Butterfly to be performed by the San Francisco Opera (SFO). Between Kaneko’s imagery and Leslie Swackhamer’s direction, SFO managed to get beyond the warped stereotypes of David Belasco, giving the music a fighting chance of rising above the narrative.
The Otello recording is more satisfying. Ironically, however, my primary focus did not dwell on either tenor James McCracken in the title role or soprano Gwyneth Jones as Desdemona. Rather, as in the play by William Shakespeare, the narrative revolves around Iago, rather than the title character; and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s account of that role is never short of dynamite. This is most evident in the second act delivery of “Credo in un Dio crudel!” (I believe in a cruel God); and Barbirolli’s conducting of the New Philharmonic Orchestra underscores every one of Fischer-Dieskau’s subtle details.
As to the duets and the instrumental selections, none of the tracks rise above the level of mildly satisfying. Barbirolli is clearly not in his comfort zone when taking on the operatic repertoire. However, given the heights of so many of the other performances in this Warner collection, there are clearly no end of reasons why his recordings are just as significant today as they were when he was alive.
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