Some seventy to seventy-five years ago, in the late-mono, early-stereo LP time, we wrestled to the mat the problem of making effective opera recordings under expanded studio conditions. We didn’t always keep the beast pinned, of course, and there were several different approaches embraced by the commercial recording labels that we could contrast and argue over. But on a fair number of occasions, we did more or less figure out how to get a recognizable result. Then the economic support for that enterprise fell away, and the industry came to a close-to-dead halt. Now, it seems, we’ve forgotten what we once knew. Sony’s Otello, recorded in Rome in 2019 and released some ten months ago, is an ugly example of this loss.

As I noted with respect to Meistersinger (see the post of 1/17/21), it’s so rare these days to see high-level operatic forces committed to the recording of a 19th-Century canonical work that one is almost compelled to give heed. The ostensible selling points for this version of Verdi’s great tragedy would be the conductor, Antonio Pappano, and the tenor, Jonas Kaufmann. But I was also interested by the fact that this was not a recording drawn from a live production, like the Meistersinger, but an old-fashioned summoning of the vassals to a series of recording sessions, and with the present-day model of the forces that produced one of the first LP Otellos back in 1954, Rome’s Accademia di Santa Cecilia. After one listening, I’ve kept it in lead position here strictly on a current-interest basis, but won’t be trying your patience with extended performance analysis. This is not so much because I think the performance is terrible, but because the recording itself is so unmoored from operatic reality that I can’t tell.

I hope we can all agree that an opera should take place in a shared space, in which all its elements are heard and seen in constant relation to one another, and that as the performance goes forward in this space, the dynamic range of its sounds is sufficiently proportional to ensure a continuity of musical and dramatic expression. Without those basic conditions, we don’t really have an opera, and simply having one must precede any evaluation of its merits or report on its impact. This recording fails to establish those basic conditions. It does not sound as if its elements share a space or are in constant relation to one another. Rather, its sounds seem to emanate from a number of sources (as distinct from the “locations” of staging or of musical origin, which in any case are minimal), each designed to enhance its assigned fragment, which is then strategically positioned in a mix, as I imagine many rock albums are constructed. (My knowledge of rock albums is extremely limited.) The puzzling aspect of this is that while the Santa Cecilia’s present home, the auditorium in the Parco della Musica, may not be one of the world’s great acoustic treasures, it’s not half bad—no reason I can think of that a good recording couldn’t be done there. And with respect to a proportionality of dynamics, the recording is beyond the bounds of what would enable an ease of continuous ear-contact, a sense of presence, and keep us in touch with the progression of the drama. Sometimes this is hard to disentangle from the fetishizing of the soft end that has been epidemic among conductors and orchestras for some time now; but whether or not that’s the case here, the recording’s width of dynamic range (which we would normally count as an asset) is too extreme for settled listening.