Don Carlo had a 'moment' around the 1960s and 70s. Everybody seemed to think it was an excessively ambitious failure until Rudolf Bing featured it front and center during his Met tenure (one of his rare services to music...), then the whole world seemed to be doing it. It was exactly the same moment as the Mahler and Bruckner revival, and there is something 'Mahlerian' about Don Carlo, spreading out the largest, most existential issues on the broadest possible canvas.
Obviously the most legendary performance is the Visconti-directed Don Carlo at Covent Garden under Giulini - Christoff and Vickers as great as they'd ever be, with Gobbi and Barbieri along with them for every step. Clearly, there's Don Carlo 'before and after' that performance, and it probably did more than any other to solidify Don Carlo's place in the center of the operatic repertoire.
But at the same time as that, Karajan was already championing Don Carlo, a score which fit his particular mix of mass and delicacy better than nearly any other opera. Fricsay had already championed it and his death let go the possibility of a recording for the ages, but Solti would pick it up soon, and regardless of what people say, his Don Carlo is wonderful, or at least wonderful compared to what would come much later. Abbado and Levine and Schippers were just around the corner. Famous later performances like Haitink and Muti, for all their virtues, would have a simple problem: later voices do not have the idiomatic command of Verdi that opera houses were still able to get until roughly 1990.
But alongside the 'stars' were the second line of two dozen maestri di capella, mostly from Italy (though not all) who probably knew these works better than Karajan ever could. The 'last' of which was Papa Santi.
During this Salzburg performance in 1960, Nello Santi was not yet even 30 (and looked exactly like he did at 80...), but this performance shows that he was practically born with that innate knowledge of Verdi's idiom. The command here is not quite like anything you'll hear from any 'star maestro,' even Giulini. He follows the singers through every odd twist and turn (and Fernandi particularly takes him all sorts of bizarre places). While the Vienna Philharmonic always played plenty of Verdi, I doubt you'd ever heard them sound so much like La Scala as here. The phrases rise and fall so innately that it flows like the Tiber.
This is what a great operatic maestro does, and even as a kid, Nello Santi was clearly that. His biggest contribution is that he makes everybody else better than they are without him. The Vienna Philharmonic, who so often makes Verdi sound like Wagner, is simply as close to ideal as an orchestra ever gets in a work this large. Christoff's FIlipo is obviously well-known, but listen to what Ettore Bastianini does as Rodrigo - you may not hear a more perfect rendering. There is no performance of Carlo's quite like Eugenio Fernandi, whose phrasings and colorings are varied enough (some would probably say 'indulgent') to sound like a tenor from at least a generation earlier. Even Regina Resnik, a 'general practitioner' of operatic repertoire, sounds perfectly Verdian here. The only real problem is Jurniac as Elisabetta (question for the singers out there, is Elisabetta particularly difficult? A lot of great sopranos seem to have trouble with it.). But Jurniac is still pretty good, the only true problem is coordination in the Auto-da-fe scene, which is obviously incredibly tricky.
The famous live Giulini is still better than this, but that's an unrepeatable moment in the history of musical performance, an artistic miracle that continually leaves you gasping. This performance is far too naturally musical leave you gasping, and such performances are if anything, more valuable. It sounds like a living organism that breathes of its own accord, and there can be no higher aspiration than that. This is more than mere greatness, this is pure music, more Mozart than Mahler.
I've struggled mightily with Don Carlo in the past - it's so gloomy, so long, so humorless, the plot often makes no sense, andthere are so many editions. But I've come to view it as a kind of 'operatic novel', and its bloat is ultimately part of its appeal. Without the dry passages, do not get to those distant places which may represent the high watermark of Verdi's musical imagination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZR53COKyDQ
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