GREAT RECORDINGS phase 19

VERDI
La Traviata

Riccardo Muti

5 09694 2 (D&T)
5 09695 2 (Angel)

Stereo
DDD
Recorded 1980
2:09:27 (2CD)

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Made in Kingsway Hall, London, in 1980, this was EMI’s first digital recording of an opera. So successful was the sound caught then that nearly 30 years later it has required minimal attention from EMI’s remastering engineers.

This classic recording, with its near-unbeatable trio of principals in Scotto, Kraus and Bruson, was also pathbreaking: as Richard Osborne notes in his booklet essay, it ‘was not the first to be made without cuts, but it was the first to play the score very much as Verdi had left it in 1854, without the various vocal accretions singers had brought to the piece down the years.’

Scotto would later relate: ‘When I came to record La traviata with Muti, he said: “Why don’t we try and do exactly what Verdi wrote, and nothing more?” And we did. We looked inside the score and sought to understand and interpret the character, with my personality, certainly, but mainly with and through Verdi’s music’.

The work is tautly, elegantly and expressively conducted by Riccardo Muti, then nearing the end of his reign as principal conductor of the Maggio Musicale, Florence, and yet to assume the position at La Scala.

In an innovation for GRoC, the full libretto and translations are now accessible by computer in pdf form on CD 2; the booklet retains the full track-by-track synopsis.

Award: Diapason d’Or