RECORDINGS IN REVIEW: RENATA SCOTTO

1 7 9 R R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W V I N C E N T G I R O U D Ask anyone who were the greatest postwar sopranos in Italian opera. The names you will get are likely to be Greek-American, African American, Australian, and Spanish. Rephrase the question , limiting it to the greatest Italian sopranos, and you will probably get three names: Renata Tebaldi, naturally, and in the generation immediately following, Mirella Freni and Renata Scotto. Scotto, who turned eighty this past 24 February, may not have held the stage for quite as long as Freni, who at the age of seventy sang Joan of Arc in Tchaikovsky’s Orleanskaya deva; nevertheless her career spanned four and a half decades and started unusually early. Her last appearances were as Madame Flora in Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium in Turin in 1999 and Klytemnestra in Richard Strauss’s Elektra in Seville in 2002, having made her debut as Violetta in Verdi’s Traviata at eighteen in her native Savona, on the Ligurian coast, repeating the role in Milan the next night. Although no recording remains, to my knowledge, of those early Violettas, Scotto can still be heard in the role at three different stages of her career. In the 1963 studio recording, with Antonino Votto conducting the orchestra and chorus of La Scala 1 8 0 G I R O U D Y (DGG 2726 049), Scotto, at her youthful best, makes an a√ecting heroine, adequately partnered by the dependable Gianni Raimondi and Ettore Bastianini, who clearly thought that his glorious voice exempted him from the need to observe Verdi’s abundant dynamics markings. Ten years later, Scotto’s Violetta was captured live in Tokyo in September 1973, under Nino Verchi, accompanied by José Carreras (a late substitute for another scheduled tenor) and the admirable Sesto Bruscantini. This impressive performance, allowing for the inevitable imperfections of a live event, was recently reissued, in more than acceptable sound, as part of the Scotto Bravissimo set (BRV 9910). It is also available in video (VAI, ASIN B0019K06S6), with a slightly buxom Scotto proving an e√ective and moving actress, while the twenty-four-year-old Carreras is as dashing physically as vocally. Less than ten years later, Scotto recorded the role one more time, with Riccardo Muti (EMI CDS 7 47059 8). As usual with this conductor (Votto’s pupil), traditional cuts are eliminated: the tenor (an amazingly youthfulsounding Alfredo Kraus, then in his mid-fifties) and baritone (Renato Bruson) get their cabalettas, and all repeats are observed. Interpolated high notes are banned – and not missed. If Scotto’s top register is not as secure as it once was, her interpretation has deepened and her soft singing is even more miraculous than it was twenty years earlier. A pity the sound engineering is of the artificial kind too often favored by EMI in those years. These three Traviata recordings give an excellent picture of Scotto’s virtues: an attractive timbre, balancing sweetness with just the right note of acidity; an appealing use of vocal coloring, allowing her to convey the whole palette of emotions; and, perhaps above all, an extraordinary sense of nuance, which characterizes all her interpretations. In her 1984 autobiography, More Than a Diva, written with Octavio Roca, she credits her technique to the Catalan soprano Mercedes Llopart, with whom she studied on Kraus’s recommendation (Llopart’s other students included Fiorenza Cossotto, Anna Mo√o, and Elena Suliotis). Before Scotto turned twenty, she had sung her first Butterfly at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, when she was barely older than Puccini’s heroine (at least in the second part of the opera). It was soon to become one of her greatest roles, the one in which she debuted at Covent Garden in 1962 and in New York three years R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W 1 8 1 R later (a snippet from the Met broadcast, with John Alexander as Pinkerton, can be heard on YouTube...