Somebody said that to put on a memorable production of Il Trovatore, you needed the four best singers in the world. That's not entirely true. Here you have one indisputably great singer--Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the Elvis of opera as one newspaper called him--and two very good ones in Jose Cura and Yvonne Naef. The soprano is just adequate. Sets and costumes are appropriate, the orchestra sounds fine (but will we ever hear an Anvil Chorus with a real anvil?). In 1969 RCA assembled a dream cast of Leontyne Price, Placido Domingo, Sherrill Milnes and Fiorenza Cossotto for an LP recording--if that had been filmed it would stand as the benchmark video for this opera.
