Falstaff (Complete Opera in English)

"It is serious competition for the currently available recordings in Italian."
(Pick of the Month BBC Music Magazine Aug 2002)

This is the premiere recording sung in English of Verdi's supreme comedy, Falstaff, in Chandos' popular 'Opera in English' series. The translation is by Amanda Holden

The recording boasts a strong cast, supported by the theatrically idiomatic English National Opera Orchestra and Chorus, under the baton of Paul Daniel, one of the most sought-after and admired opera conductors.

Boito's brilliant libretto, with its direct Shakespearean heritage, is ideally suited for performance in English, with all the wonderful nuances of the text - so closely tied in with the music - fully appreciable.

In Falstaff Verdi finally wrote the comedy he had wanted to write all his life but had not been able to because of the lack of an appropriate libretto.

This crowning opus of Verdi's glorious Indian Summer is the true distillation of his amazing achievement over a career of some sixty years in the opera house. In this culminating triumph of his old age, Verdi is hardly recognisable as the composer of what he called his 'galley years' when his style conformed to the structure and style of the period. By the time he reached Falstaff, his final operatic masterpiece, he had virtually rejected all the formal constraints and methods of his youth, writing in a through-composed manner where recitative and aria merge naturally and unobtrusively into each other.

In this he was enormously helped by having Boito, himself a composer of some stature, as his librettist. Adapting passages from Shakespeare's Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor in masterly fashion, Boito presented Verdi, after due consultation with the venerable composer, with just the text to rekindle the fires of the old master.

Boito had been responsible for the task of converting Othello into Otello, a taut drama hammered out from the playwright's somewhat sprawling text. He did exactly the same with Falstaff, at the same time providing a libretto that stands on its own as a work of literary merit. From it Verdi fashioned a comedy that moves effortlessly through three succinct acts.


PREVIOUS VERDI TITLES on Opera in English:
La traviata - CHAN 3023(2)
Rigoletto - CHAN 3030(2)
Otello - CHAN 3068(2)
Il trovatore - CHAN 3036(2)
Ernani - CHAN 3052(2)
Aida - CHAN 3074(2)