Entertainment

10:34 AM CDT on Monday, October 3, 2005

Placido Domingo has been touting his desire to record Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for years, and now it has finally happened. The new EMI recording, conducted by Antonio Pappano and co-starring Nina Stemme, has been bruited around the world as "the last big-name studio recording of an opera ever" – not just on the EMI label, but period.Is this serious or just a new marketing ploy for a triangular love story that dates back to the 12th century? Critics Scott Cantrell and Lawson Taitte discuss the merits of the chatter – and the recording – in this e-mail exchange.

Lawson Taitte: It's true that many sound-only recordings these days come from live or radio performances, and the fastest growing sector of the classical market is in DVD opera videos, also from live performances. Do you think this really is "the last"? If so, does it matter?

Scott Cantrell: Big-star studio recordings of operas have certainly become rarer, as they've become more expensive – this one reportedly around $1 million – with little likelihood of recouping costs. But billing this as the last one is a sales gimmick: "Hey, buy this – it's your last chance."

I've never been a big fan of audio-only studio recordings of operas. To me, opera is theater. I want it all: lights and action, as well as singing and playing. Sonically, audio-only recordings are usually faked-up mixes of too many microphones. And with microphones only three or four feet away – a vantage point from which these kinds of voices were never meant to be heard – we hear all sorts of imperfections that wouldn't be noticed in an opera house. Here I'm too conscious of the dryness creeping into the 63-year-old Mr. Domingo's voice.

L.T.: Ah, but we'd have never heard Mr. Domingo sing this role at all if it weren't for the studio recording. It's too heavy for his voice, and too long, so he has never risked it. I, for one, wouldn't want to be without his performance. Even as it begins to rust, Mr. Domingo's voice still makes the loveliest, the most romantic – I'd even say the prettiest – Tristan ever to be captured whole. Ben Heppner sings the role more poetically and his German is better, but even Mr. Domingo's mastery of the language has grown exponentially since his first big Wagner recording, Die Meistersinger, decades ago.

S.C.: I'm just not convinced his is the right voice for the role. It's too Italianate. I want more of the beefy German tenor sound. Ben Heppner's my dream voice for this role, and the Met DVD with Eaglen stirs me in ways Domingo and company just never do. As so often with studio recordings, Domingo and company offer a performance more studied, more carefully laid out, than emotionally gripping. Nina Stemme sings Isolde beautifully, but that's about it. Mihoko Fujimura's Brangäne is nicely sung, too, but I'd like more difference between the two women's voices. René Pape is the standout, a King Marke of real wounded dignity. Apart from Olaf Bär's blustery Kurwenal, he's also the only native German-speaker, and, boy, can you tell it. Antonio Pappano conducts sympathetically, but, well, the Covent Garden orchestra isn't the Vienna Philharmonic – or even the Met. I'm not a big fan of James Levine, but he's a more personable interpreter on the Met DVD.

L.T.: Actually, I heard surprises throughout, and they probably wouldn't be as clear if the recording didn't have the typical studio balance, with the mikes providing that detail you wouldn't hear in the opera house. All the singers, but especially the two women, observe niceties of dynamics I've never heard before – typically a sudden piano or pianissimo at the top of a rising vocal line.

I'd agree, though, that Mr. Pappano's conducting disappoints. Isolde's passionate solo about "Frau Minne" toward the beginning of Act II just never takes flight, for instance.

S.C.: The rise of DVD is the gods' gift to opera lovers. And LOTS of opera is coming out on the new medium, mainly from European opera houses. (Union costs and minimal government support make video recordings largely impossible on these shores.) And most of them sound far more natural, with a "live" feeling of space around both singers and orchestra, than most studio recordings. I didn't care for the staging on the recent Baden-Baden Parsifal from Opus Arte, but the high-resolution video and audio are stunning.

L.T.: I found that staging revelatory, in a perverse sort of way, but for me opera DVDs are a mixed bag. I wouldn't want to watch even the best production over and over again. DVDs are a great way to get your bearings in an opera you don't know very well (such as Rameau's Les Boréades in its second or third production ever, to use an extreme example).

An interesting staging may give you new insights into a piece you know well. But for an old favorite, I'd usually rather create my own staging in my head and listen to the greatest singers who ever did those roles – on a sound-only recording. That's one of the unstated reasons we're not getting many new studio CD recordings, isn't it – there are so few current stars (in Verdi especially) who can compete with the best of the past?

In sheer vocal terms, this new Tristan und Isolde compares pretty well with the standard benchmarks. For me, only Flagstad and Furtwangler on EMI 50 years ago and Nilsson and Windgassen and Bohm on Deutsche Grammophon 35 years ago equal or surpass this one among official studio recordings.

S.C.: The new Tristan does provide a novel hybrid of audio and video. The boxed set includes a DVD that holds the entire opera audio, with a simultaneous video track of the ongoing texts and translations – even stage directions. I actually found it a fascinating way to experience the opera.

E-mail scantrell@dallasnews.com

E-mail ltaitte@dallasnews.com