Tancredi is Rossini’s first fully imagined essay in the serious style; it was also one of the first operas to be prepared for the Fondazione Rossini’s Critical Edition. By rights, it should have won early laurels on record, too; but it was not to be. Though an off-air recording based on the new critical edition circulated in the late 1970s, with Marilyn Horne and the young Katia Ricciarelli in the leading roles, no studio recording was made. CBS finally recorded the opera, live in Venice, but despite having Horne in the title-role, it was a dull affair, starchily cast and conducted (Sony Classical, 8/88). Worse, CBS were disinclined to activate their tie-up with Fonit Cetra and take into their catalogue Gabriele Ferro’s excellent 1978 WDR Cologne/Cetra recording with Fiorenza Cossotto, Lella Cuberli and the period instrumentalists of Cappella Coloniensis. As a result, that recording ended up in a kind of commercial limbo.
When a knight in shining armour finally did appear, he came from an unexpected direction. Last year, Naxos broke a lance with tardier rivals by releasing a brand-new budget-price recording of Tancredi that is in almost every respect superb: vividly and beautifully sung, stylishly conducted, shrewdly recorded. And now, within the twelvemonth, a rival of comparable character and quality appears. It was ever thus!
The new RCA set cannot match the Naxos on price, and as a performance it equals its rival rather than surpasses it. On textual matters, though, the two sets are complementary. Only weeks after the Venetian prima in February 1813, Rossini reworked the end of the opera for performances in Ferrara, reproducing the so-called tragic ending of Voltaire’s original drama in which Tancredi is mortally wounded in his victory over the Saracens. The fact that Tancredi dies in the Ferrara version does not render the revised opera ‘tragic’ in any classical sense of that term; but what it does do is provide one of the most surprising of all Rossinian closes, an end – a sad, touching, little dying fall of a cavatina – that must have bewildered Rossini’s contemporaries.
It is an end that barely works in practice. Somehow, it is just too modest an end to so spacious and eloquent an opera. For the Naxos recording, which Alberto Zedda both conducts and oversees editorially, an ingenious compromise is arrived at. Zedda retains the original happy ending, but pilfers the magnificent Recitativo e Rondo “Ecco amici … Perche turbar la calma” with which Rossini bolstered the Act 2 denouement in the Ferrara revision.
The more I hear it, the more I think it as good a solution as any (Ewa Podles, Tancredi on the Naxos set, sings the Ferrara Rondo superbly). On record, though, why not offer both endings? Space is the problem. Tancredi sits neatly on two well-filled CDs. The only answer, if both endings are to be offered, is to go the whole hog and offer both finales and other important alternative arias which Rossini himself wrote for the piece. This is what RCA have done. The result makes the set an expensive one, three full-price CDs, but one which dedicated Rossinians will certainly want to have. In particular, it is wonderful to have Tancredi’s ‘other’ entrance aria, the one Rossini wrote at the request of the creator of the role, Adelaide Malanotte. It is a marvellous ten-minute Recitativo e Cavatina, complete with a richly elaborated concertante violin part. Had “Di tanti palpiti” not been such a smash-hit, who knows: the alternative might have taken root of its own accord. Vesselina Kasarova sings it superbly.
Kasarova is the star of the set in other respects, too. Podles, on Naxos, is so good, it would be idle to suggest that Kasarova has it all her own way; but the Podles sound is more heavily curtained, less obviously alluring and spellbinding than Kasarova’s. Since Podles does not sing the ‘tragic’ finale, there are no comparisons to be made there. Kasarova is very affecting, acting the thing out in a way that suggests that she is not simply the possessor of a very remarkable voice. (Not that by this juncture anyone is likely to have decided that.) And yet, as I say, it does not quite come off. The conducting of Roberto Abbado may be a problem here. Much that he does is excellent, but if he has a weakness it concerns his ability to organize and sustain slow tempos. Some of Amenaide’s music rather hangs fire, soloist and conductor dancing attendance a touch uncertainly on one another. In the ‘tragic’ finale, Ferro (on Fonit Cetra) had a surer grip over the pulse and dynamic shaping of Rossini’s somewhat minimalist jottings. As a consequence, his Tancredi, Fiorenza Cossotto, needed to ‘do’ less with the declamation.
And how wonderful Ferro’s period instruments sounded, too, playing with an almost Monteverdian gravity. Abbado’s Munich players are good, but Zedda and the Collegium Instrumentale Brugense (modern instruments, old playing styles) have an added keenness of address which the more intimate, slightly more tightly focused Naxos recording nicely complements.
RCA’s Amenaide Eva Mei is almost as persuasive as Sumi Jo on Naxos, but not quite. (It is the Podles-Kasarova situation in reverse.) Between the two tenors, Ramon Vargas (RCA) and the exciting young American Stanford Olsen (Naxos), there is little to choose. Both are first-class. RCA have the better Isaura, but that is neither here nor there.
Perhaps I can best sum up the current situation by saying that whenever I want to hear the opera through (as Dr Johnson would have put it), I shall probably take the Naxos set from the shelves. I shall value the RCA set too, however: for reference, for delighted dipping hither and thither, not least in the appendices, and for the remarkable Kasarova.'