A word, though, about those recitatives. As much as anything else about the performance, it is they that will sound utterly foreign to educated younger listeners today, principally for two reasons: 1) They are accompanied on the piano alone, which restricts itself to the playing of chords that are arpeggiated at the start of a sequence, simple and crisp once the singers get going.  2) They are rendered with tremendous energy and linguistic fluency, and at Gatling-gun pace. This foregoes the more naturalistically timed setting-up of nuanced exchanges and the coming-together of onstage with continuo events that can often clarify a moment or intensify suspense in more recent performances influenced by, on one hand, performance-practice usages, and on the other by modern acting manners. Instead of that, it aims for a virtuosic play of repartee, a type of rhetorical contest that is spontaneous in tone and always urgent, as if the characters were in a race against time to accomplish their intentions. Practically speaking, it also moves us through the recitatives and returns us to real music sooner. (Assignment: time out the recitatives in the Met ’42 (or Salzburg ’37) and La Scala ’11 performances, and report back on the total differential. You are allowed to add in the accompanied recits, like Anna’s “Era già alquanto” or Elvira’s “In quali eccessi,” and thus take some account of conductorial preferences.) In this style of recitation, there is not much room for accompanimental embellishment or commentary. And before the miking of plucked keyboard instruments was even possible, let alone approved, there was no hope of the harpsichord, with or without a continuo partner, surviving from a pit in the midst of a big-house opera orchestra in a big-house house. Re-hearing this way of reciting, the one I first knew, I found that after a few necessary minutes of time-travel adjustment I was struck anew by its liveliness and by the sense of control from the stage it conveys, and full of admiration for the skills of both singers and pianist—those chords land right on cue every time amid the rapid-fire chatter. ^(I)  Of course this is all more plausible when the singers are native Italian; consequently, Pinza is front and center here. But though I don’t care for much of what Kipnis does (Virgilio Lazzari, in the Salzburg performance, renders the recits with lighter tread, better sense, and superior taste), he does keep up. That must have taken a lot of work.