CD-1219(2) VERDI: REQUIEM AND TE DEUM. A PREVIOUSLY UNISSUED TOSCANINI CONCERT RECORDING. With Herva Nelli (soprano), Nan Merriman (mezzo-soprano), William McGrath (tenor) and Norman Scott (bass) and the NBC Symphony Orchestra Collegiate Chorale under Robert Shaw Carnegie Hall, New York, April 26, 1948, cond. Arturo Toscanini. Digital restoration: Aaron Z. Snyder (2008). Notes by Harris Goldsmith. Total times = 61:35 and 37:19. UPC# 0-17685-12192 0

BUZZ: Harris Goldsmith writes in his note: “This 1948 version is almost completely without mishap. Indeed, there is ample reason to consider it the finest of the Maestro’s achievements with this monumental Masterpiece [the Requiem]. The pacing resembles that of the November 23rd, 1940 performance in its nobility and unhurried breadth. A few sections of the Dies Irae are a shade tauter, less rhetorical and more flowing. A comparison between the 1938 BBC Requiem, which seems to me overly beefy and sectionalized, with the 1940 broadcast (Music & Arts CD 4240) affords striking evidence of Toscanini’s quest for greater classicism and economy. By the 1948 performance that transition had been carried a step further still. But happily, there is nary a trace of that “late-Toscanini” impatience so characteristic of the 1950 La Scala and 1951 NBC Requiems (whether live or doctored recordings)”.