Listen to a Sample:

It is nice to see that a few years after the death of Luciano Pavarotti people are beginning to separate the artist from the P.R. campaign and we are able to remind ourselves that this man was truly a great artist.  He was not yet thirty when he sang this performance of La Traviata and yet the vocal technique is rock solid and the voice is fresh and astonishingly beautiful.  However, recordings of Pavarotti singing Alfredo abound.  The real interest of this recording is the excellent Margherita Rinaldi as Violetta.  The voice is hard to categorize.  It had a wonderful girlish quality with bloom on the top.  She uses the natural innocence of her voice to her benefit to highlight the frailty of Violetta.  Giuseppe Taddei shows us the warmer side of Germont particularly in his aria where we see a loving father as opposed to the usual stern Victorian patriarch.  The sound is very good.

NOTE:
A portion of "Di Provenza il mar" is missing as well as the last 20 seconds of "Sempre libera".

OD 10558-2