With appearances in stage productions in Vienna, Moscow and New York, as well as the three concert performances at the Salzburg festival in August, from which this recording of Manon Lescaut has been created, the title role in Puccini’s first successful opera has dominated Anna Netrebko’s schedule in 2016. Deutsche Grammophon’s rush release of these discs is presumably intended to coincide with Netrebko’s most recent performances in the role at the Metropolitan Opera.
The sound (recorded in the Grosses Festspielhaus) is sometimes recessed and with so much applause retained, not only at the beginnings and ends of acts but after individual arias, too, it all seems a bit rough and ready, and musically uneven. Marco Armiliato’s conducting is rhythmically flaccid and the playing of the Munich Radio Orchestra efficient but rarely characterful, yet Netrebko’s performance makes it worth hearing. She charts Manon’s journey from the ingenue of the first act, through the flighty vamp of the second to the tragic figure of the last very surely, and makes her final-act aria the emotional crux of the opera, always with a wonderfully rich, perfectly controlled sound, even when her Italian diction is hit-and-miss.
Only three months ago, Deutsche Grammophon released Netrebko’s album of verismo lollipops, with Antonio Pappano conducting the Santa Cecilia orchestra, which also included the whole of the fourth act of Manon Lescaut. For that she was joined, as here, by her husband, Yusif Eyvazov, as Des Grieux. That extract didn’t reveal the tenor’s limitations in the way the performance of the whole work does. His singing is effortful from the start, the phrasing unkempt and the sound raw-edged.
Armando Pina is a suitably silver-tongued and plausible Lescaut, and the rest of the cast is decent enough. But compared with the finest versions on disc – Mirella Freni and Luciano Pavarotti on James Levine’s 1992 Decca version, say, or Maria Callas with Giuseppe di Stefano and Tullio Serafin conducting (available at bargain price on Naxos) – this doesn’t get anywhere near the emotional highs and lows that such performances regularly reach.
