One of my abiding memories of Domingo in the opera house was his Canio at Covent Garden, a quite overwhelming adumbration of wronged love and impassioned anger yet sung in perfect style. Of course, he has recorded the role before in a now-deleted RCA set (SER5635/6, 6/72), but that was much earlier in his career: here we have his interpretation at the peak of its achievement, grandly passionate in ''Vesti la giubba'', tragically overpowering in ''No, Pagliaccio non son'', and full of verbal detail in the earlier, happier passages. Throughout his tone is boldly firm and heroic. As with his Manrico, reviewed on page 651, this is surely the classic reading of our age.
I wish I could say that the rest of this film soundtrack was so imaginative or recommendable. It has, to be sure, one other superb performance, Juan Pon's Tonio, another formidable voice used to dispense intelligently, a splendid Prologue, a wonderfully moving line at his appeal to Nedda, and much else that suggests a well-founded vocal characterization. Teresa Stratas's earthy Nedda, no doubt a sensual knockout on screen, doesn't stand up to the test of the microphone, her tone breaking up distressingly under pressure. She is wooed by Alberto Rinaldi's idiomatic Silvio, his singing spoilt by a quaver in his tone. Their duet is disfigured by the huge cut that used to be established practice in the theatre. With that curtailment, it should have been possible to squeeze this performance on to two sides, or at most three. The longest side here is under 19 minutes long.
La Scala's forces have certainly been brought up on this music, but perhaps they are not accustomed to the wayward conducting of Pretre, who never allows a tempo to stay the same for more than about two bars. This provides the greatest contrast with the Eurodisc version, where Gardelli's steady hands and careful shaping of the score is much preferable and at the same time isn't short on strength or eloquence. Eurodisc, in a studio recording, do not have to cope with the peculiar sound perspectives and stage noises that afflict the Philips.
The Eurodisc cast could hardly be more different from that on the Philips set. Popp provides an almost too beautifully sung Nedda, every note and trill finely turned. She can provide tension when needed, as in her dismissal of Tonio and her final defiance of Canio's jealous hands, but I prefer a slightly more Italianate sound in this music. She is partnered in the duet with Silvio, here heard complete, by the lyrically ardent Wolfgang Brendel but even he is no match for Thomas Allen in the Muti version (HMV). Weikl's Tonio is almost as good as Pons's. He contrasts cleverly using his straight voice in the Prologue with a more biting tone in the opera itself.
Atlantov's Canio has an elemental strain to it that not even Domingo quite matches; a pent-up ferocity seems to burst out of him when he is betrayed. But his singing, by comparison with Domingo or Carreras (Muti) is musically untutored, careless over note values and, well, just a little ham. Both these versions preserve the unwritten high notes (Philips rather more of them than Eurodisc) banned by Muti, and neither of the new sets seems to me so convincing all-round as his or, in a completely different way, Karajan's (DG). But both the HMV and DG are linked with Cavalleria. No other separate recordings of Pagliacci are available at the moment. Of these two, the Gardelli offers a faithful view of the work, if you can accept Atlantov's rough moments, and is the better recorded and played. Pretre has the very special Domingo and Pons, and I have a feeling I shall want to turn to them every now and again for their singular interpretations.'