The packaging of Abbado's Verdi Requiem passes the Trades Description Act with flying colours. A soft-focus crucifix bathed in misty light invites the prospective buyer to a genuflectory performance—too much so for AB when the LPs were reviewed, and, now on CD, gaining little in acoustic clarity or intensity to bring its muted colours into clearer focus. It's difficult to beat the opening orchestral and choral bars for a sense of sheer awe; but, as soon as the performance surfaces from pianissimo, the slow tempos, soft moulding and generous rubato threaten to rob it of the very intensity at which it obviously aims.
Karajan's tempos are, in fact, generally slower, but they never feel negatively so. For one thing, DG's recorded sound quality (vintage 1985) is here both closer and clearer, and because Karajan's pointing and pacing of choral textures is so much more acute, reinforces even the most hushed invocation with a strength which Abbado's lacks. The chorus of La Scala is, as AB commented when the LP first appeared, a choir of soloists, and their uneasy blend and heavy vibrato is only emphasized on CD.
Abbado's l ine-up of soloists looks promising enough, but both individually and as a team, they cannot compare with either Karajan's (Baltsa and van Dam are his greatest assets), or with the magnificence of Solti's in a performance which, for me, is still unsurpassed (Decca). Shirley Verrett certainly uses all the time and space Abbado provides to maximum effect: this performance, warm and earthy as terracotta, contrasts nicely with Ricciarelli's other-wordly soprano, who sounds, nevertheless, enervated at times by Abbado's over-indulgence. Domingo gives a faultlessly cultivated, if somewhat chilly performance, but Ghiaurov, for all his sense of real awe, is less at ease, contributing to the blurred edges of this reading with ill-focused, foggy timbres.
Comparison can, I know, be odious, and Abbado's followers will doubtless be loyal to him even in comparative weakness. I cannot resist, though, taking this opportunity to remind any new collector what lies in store on Solti's recording: a dense, ringing deathshead of a ''Mors stupebit'' from Martti Talvela, performances of statuesque simplicity from Dame Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne, and Pavarotti singing for all the world as if his white handerchief could be wrung out several times over.'