Though separated by 22 years, these two recordings of Rossini's more or less indestructible masterpiece have some similar aims, not least theatricality, sportive elaborations from the Rosina, and a text full enough to permit the inclusion of the Count's big aria near the end of Act 2.
The CBS set, recorded by Fonit Cetra in Milan in 1982, has Marilyn Horne as its principal centre of interest. Unlike RCA's Roberta Peters, Horne has the right voice for the role. She is also a lady of wit and resource, a consummate vocal strategist with a nice feel for the histrionic and a sense of humour that is broad but astute. As an interpreter of Rosina's role she is outpointed only by Callas on the Galliera/EMl set. Callas is happier with the text as Rossini wrote it than Horne appears to be; she finds all the necessary humour in the notes and otherwise confines herself to such classically simple strategies as ensuring that she, and not her Count, Luigi Alva, has the final verse in the concluding vaudeville. Callas is also more sympathetically recorded than Horne, whose breathing is occasionally rather obtrusive on the Milan recording, and she never drags on the beat as Horne sometimes does.
With the exception of Samuel Ramey's Basilio which is notably well sung, the CBS cast is better in ensembles than in the solo items. Nucci is rather an aggressive Figaro in his cavatina and Barbadni, the Almaviva, is tested to near destruction by some of Rossini's writing. He has some success with ''Se il mio nome'' which, rightly, he shapes as a mini music-drama; but his cavatina is not especially well done and the big Act 2 aria verges on—no, frankly is—embarrassing in places. Here the RCA set has a clear advantage with Cesare Valletti as an expert and expressive Almaviva well on top of the Act 2 aria. Chailly tends to conduct Rossini as though he was writing in the 1830s and 1840s, the playing trenchant but unsmiling. That said, he is not especially consistent. Sometimes the score is suddenly and wonderfully lightened, though this occasionally catches the engineers unawares. Woodwinds, with their subversive manifestos, descants, and asides do not always fully 'tell' in the texturing. In the end, this is a version likely to find most favour with admirers of Marilyn Horne. Leinsdorf's 1958 New York Metropolitan Opera recording was famous in its day for being unusually complete, for the casting of Valletti, the set's most stylish member, and for its general vitality. I see I was rather stuffy about it in Opera on record (Hutchinson: 1979) and there is a good deal that is, in theory, objectionable. Such Is the set's general vitality, though, there are probably many opera-goers who might enjoy its rumbustious knockabout style. Valletti apart, the men go in for a good deal of dramatic improvisation of the nudge-nudge-know-what-I-mean school, though when Tozzi pulls the old gag in the Calumny aria (transposed down to C) of turning ''va ronzando'' into the even more appropriately onomatopoeic ''ronz-za-za-za-zando'' one can't help thinking that Rossini must be kicking himself for not having thought of it first. Whatever you think of some of the ad libs., there is no doubt that Merrill, Corena et al. are fairly expert at pulling them off.
Roberta Peters is a coloratura Rosina, transposing her cavatina up a tone and adding endless pyrotechnic displays of the kind that so annoyed Rossini when Patti, under Strakosch's influence sang the aria to him in Paris in the early 1860s. To contemporary ears it all sounds about as dated as ''Two-way Family Favourties'', but as no one does this anymore, the recording begins to take on the status of a collector's item. Leinsdorf is sometimes inconsiderate to his singers—the Act I finale has an unruly, Hogarthian feel to it—and the Metropolitan woodwinds can be careless of intonation, but the performance has panache, of that there is no doubt. The set could probably have been best summed up by the late Dick Emery with his famous catchphrase, ''You are awful—but I like you''.'