****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
WAR AND PEACE was the first opera I attended after I moved to Boston. It was 1980, and Sarah Caldwell was reviving her famous production of it. While I fully recognized that there was some splendid music, I thought that it was too diffuse dramatically, and there was also a fair amount of "movie music" filler. Perhaps no composer, even one as great as Prokofiev could do justice to Tolstoy's vast panorama. Thirty six years later, I still feel much the same. I've heard several different recordings, and I still feel that it is a bit of a non-starter.That said, this is an astounding wrong language performance...Rosanna Carteri, Fedora Barbieri, Ettore Bastianini, Italo Tajo, Fernando Corena, Franco Corelli, Mirto Picchi, Renato Capecchi, and Anselmo Colzani, to name only the most famous cast members, were among the very finest singers active in Italy at the time. They are all in top form, but Bastianini, and above all, Corelli, outdo themselves.Artur Rodzinski gets all that he can out of the score. It is a very cohesive performance.The sound recording is not great, but better than many "live" ones, vintage 1953.There is a decent plot summary and track listing, but no texts or translations.
