When we still lack a fully digital CD set of Tosca, it is good to have in a fine transfer the best-recorded of the analogue versions. The 1976 Philips sound is outstandingly good, and on CD comes over in vivid three-dimensional fidelity with voices, instruments and stage effects all very precisely placed. As a performance the Karajan/DG version is higher-powered—so, of course, is the classic Sabata/EMI set with Callas—but the Berlin sound becomes congested by comparison with the Philips at climaxes. So the big choral climax of Scarpia's monologue, ''Tre sbirri'', at the end of Act 1, is far more spaciously recorded in the Davis version, with more detail coming through and the massed forces well-separated. The age of the recording is revealed only in a suspicion of 'fizz' on the brass.
For most of the time the sound on the Karajan recording is both brilliant and vivid, but it is not so consistent as the Philips, in which such offstage effects as the locking of the grille when Angelotti hides away has astonishing realism. At times the concern for realism makes for less exciting results, as in that monologue of Scarpia, when the off-stage canons boom away as though from quite a distance, where Karajan's boom right in your face, as though the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle itself is under fire. One slight drawback from the natural placing of voices, not spotlit, is that the differentiation with fully offstage voices is not always so sharply defined as it might be, whether in Tosca's very first entry or in Cavaradossi's cries as he is tortured in Act 2.
As to the performance, it too stands as one of the most consistent, not just in the casting but in Davis's clean-cut reading, which structures the tautly conceived piece with the sharpness of a massive symphony. Carreras is on balance in sweeter voice than he was for Karajan three years later, and the size of Caballe's voice is all the more apparent when it is not spotlit in the balancing. Wixell as Scarpia is not nearly so sinister as Raimondi for Karajan, let alone the unique Gobbi for de Sabata, but it is a finely detailed reading, intelligently sung. One point of casting I had forgotten—the young Samuel Ramey helps the opening enormously as a superb Angelotti.'