Tosca, that “shabby little shocker” as Joseph Kerman called it, surely needs robustly healthy voices before anything. In somewhere like the Arena at Verona this performance would have the crowd on its feet, responding to the three principals’ generously ample and exciting tone. Gauci’s slight hardness and vibrato under pressure would be thought a small price to pay, and if Aragall sounds very slightly unsteady once or twice he demonstrates, if only very briefly at the beginning of “O dolci mani”, that he can still produce a liquidly beautiful head voice. And Sardinero, best of all, is all the more dangerous a Scarpia for singing with admirable line and, in his Act 2 scene with Tosca, elegant insinuation.
On CD one is rather more apt to notice that Gauci conveys little of Tosca’s character, almost nothing of her charm or wit, that one brief moment aside Aragall never sings quietly (“Recondita armonia”, marked p at the outset, is close to ff throughout) and that Rahbari, praiseworthily careful over clarity of detail, is also uncommonly fond of extremes of tempo. Much of the First Act is decidedly fast but the Te Deum is very slow, both of Scarpia’s solos in Act 2 are rushed, the prelude to Act 3 is molto rubato, and so on. And on CD one certainly notices, at times almost to the exclusion of everything else, the extremely odd recording. At first it sounds rather like a live performance: Angelotti, for example, seems to be skulking fearfully at the back of the stage. But then it becomes apparent that the singers and the orchestra are in quite different acoustics: the principals in particular sound as though they are in echo chambers. It does them no favours. Aragall’s voice, in Act 1 especially, is unpleasantly hardened by this, and Gauci might seem a more sympathetic Tosca without it. To make matters worse the cannon heard repeatedly throughout the Te Deum is very close (it is marked ‘distant’) and sounds like someone energetically hammering nails into a packing case; in Act 3 the firing squad execute Cavaradossi with pop-guns. A pity: with a less distracting recording and with a less fussy conductor, one prepared to encourage his cast to sing quietly and subtly at times, these artists could have produced a more than respectable Tosca; as it is, only Sardinero gives much pleasure.'