La favorite is one of Donizetti’s last operas, and one of the few he composed for Paris. It debuted in December of 1840 and was a great success; the success lasted and by 1897 it had been heard at the Opéra 660 times. It was occasionally sung in German (in Vienna), and more frequently in an Italian translation; indeed, in this century, more audiences have heard La favorita than La favorite. In its original French it is more graceful and the flow is more natural, particularly in the recitatives. There have been a few recordings of the work in Italian–private ones with Cossotto and Alfredo Kraus; Simionato and di Stefano; and a commercial one with Cossotto and Pavarotti, as well as one in French, with Gloria Scalchi and Luca Canonici.
This present set, recorded live in Munich, has much to recommend it but it doesn’t quite fill the bill. Marcello Viotti leads a tempered, balanced performance that may be a bit short on excitement but is wonderfully clear; he gets the long lines of Donizetti’s melodies just right and holds the big ensembles together well. His Munich forces play and sing handsomely. In Vesselina Kasarova we have a Léonor of admirable poise and beautiful tone; the voice is ravishing from top to bottom and her intelligence and sincerity are never in doubt. What’s lacking is a certain “oomph” needed for the part to be put across: Léonor, the king’s mistress and in love with Fernand, is in a terrible situation, and Kasarova seems slightly above it; she goes for understatement and gets it, but it fails to ignite. Fernand is nicely handled by Ramon Vargas, who uses his lightish tenor well, except at its very top (and the role is cruelly high). He sings off the text and we believe him–he has everything except a certain level of comfort. Anthony Michaels-Moore uses his dry-sounding baritone well to portray the nasty Alphonse XI and bass Carlo Colombara is a suitably morose and disapproving Balthazar. We are left with a good performance of La favorite, but the Cossotto-Pavarotti-Bonynge La favorita still is the best representation of this opera on discs.
