TOSCANINI Verdi: Otello (1947) - PACO033

Toscanini's classic 1947 Otello newly restored & remastered

Possibly the best recording of Otello ever made - now in stunning XR sound

This recording, taken from two specially-lengthened broadcasts on 6th and 13th December, 1947, is widely regarded as perhaps the greatest ever made of Verdi's masterpiece, Otello. As NBC announcer Ben Grauer notes in his introduction to the first broadcast, it has a special link to Toscanini, who as a young cellist had played in the world première of the piece, under Verdi's baton, in La Scala, Milan on 5th February, 1887, some 60 years earlier.

Verdi is regarded by many as especially important to Toscanini, and this is among his greatest recordings - Mortimer Frank writes: "Of all the composers in Toscanini's repertory, Verdi was probably closest to him... what NBC preserved... if not necessarily representative of his staged performances or of his best work, is often compelling. Given limitations such as occasionally weak casting, they are uneven. Bet when everything more or less fell into place, as in the complete Otello, a performance of towering merit resulted."

Meanwhile we see in the notes on this work at Wikipedia: "most music-guide reviewers contend that a recording made of a 1947 radio broadcast of the opera, conducted with thrilling verve and precision by Arturo Toscanini and featuring such solid singers as Herva Nelli, Ramón Vinay and Giuseppe Valdengo, is musically (if not in terms of sound quality) the best of these versions".

For the restoration and remastering engineer tackling this recording today it is the phrase in paratheses above which is in sore need of justified removal. One discography of Toscanini lists sux separate releases of this recording, and I'm reasonably confident that there are actually more than this. Yet when I visited ardent Toscanini fan and collector Christophe Pizzutti earlier this year to take temporary charge of a large number of rare recordings for transfer and restoration, it was this recording he repeatedly pressed me to work upon, convinced that my XR remastering technique could finally reveal the full sonic magnificence of this immortal performance.

And so, with sources provided both by Christophe and by other collectors, I've endeavoured to assemble the very best quality material from which to assemble what I hope can be seen as a definitive recording of the two broadcasts (note that some recordings switch between live and rehearsal material, others include sections of severly reduced fidelity, none has had the benefit of XR re-equalisation and the latest remastering techniques associated with it).

The recording was made in the very end of the pre-tape era, and would have been preserved over a number of acetate discs. Fortunately these have been remarkably well-preserved in various incarnations, and the results of careful selections of the best possible sources and the magic of both XR remastering and Ambient Stereo processing (direct mono is of course also available) makes a huge impact on the final overall sound quality of the recording. This is one of Toscanini's greatest masterpieces, and it's never sounded better.

Andrew Rose