Essential Puccini

EMI's two-disc set, Essential Puccini, offers a generous selection of arias, duets, and ensembles from nine of his operas. The various tracks, mostly from EMI archives, were recorded between 1959 and 2001, so the sound quality is variable. The singers include some of the most illustrious of the late 20th century, such as Maria Callas, Mirella Freni, Victoria de los Angeles, Montserrat Caballé, Renata Scotto, Birgit Nilsson, Angela Gheorghiu, Jussi Björling, Franco Corelli, Nicolai Gedda, Plácido Domingo, Roberto Alagna, and Tito Gobbi. The album has a somewhat haphazard quality. There are some outstanding, best-of-their-kind performances intermixed with some that are decidedly mediocre. The arrangement of the selections is odd; sometimes excerpts from the same opera are helpfully grouped together and sometimes they are not. There looks to be a half-hearted attempt to market the album to movie fans, since about half the tracks refer to movies that included the music, but about half do not, and there is a disclaimer that it was not necessarily this particular performance that was heard on the movie soundtrack. Perhaps the biggest drawback of the album is the wide range of volume levels at which the various recordings were made; it requires considerable volume adjustment from track to track to keep the sound at a reasonable level. The mixed quality of performances makes this an album that's not likely to appeal to serious fans of opera, but it could work for general listeners who want to hear some Puccini.