Forget the Complete Wagner with its paltry 43 CDs – this monolith, weighing in at a gargantuan 75 discs, beats all comers this year – that is if you can manage to struggle home with it from the shop!

From 1840 to 1860, Giuseppe Verdi produced a new opera nearly every year. A slowpoke compared with some of his contemporaries (the likes of Donizetti and Pacini could
whack out three or four operas
a year) but considering that
Verdi’s output included works
like Nabucco, Macbeth, Rigoletto,
La Traviata, Il Trovatore and Un
Ballo In Maschera, that’s pretty good
going by anyone’s standards. He slowed down over the following 30 years, with only five more works seeing the light of day – but what masterworks they were!

Decca and Deutsche Grammophon have made so many recordings over the years that it comes as no surprise that Universal Music are able to curate a “complete works” of the depth of quality that we have here. The classic sets include Kleiber’s La Traviata with Cotrubas and Domingo, Abbado’s Macbeth, Giulini’s Rigoletto and Il Trovatore, Domingo’s finest Otello and Karajan’s earlier Aida.

We also get both versions of La Forza del Destino (St Petersburg and Milan) and both French and Italian versions of Don Carlo. There’s the odd duffer – Sutherland and Pavarotti at their most lacklustre in the 1987 Ernani, an uneven Alzira (not much choice here, I’m afraid) and a second-class Aroldo (the revision of Stiffelio) – but otherwise it’s golden all the way. The lesser-known works include nothing that’s utterly devoid of interest and, if you aren’t familiar with them, a great many gems.
The conductor Lamberto Gardelli did sterling service in this field back in the 1970s and we can thank him and his excellent casts (Carreras, Caballé, Norman, Bergonzi, Raimondi, Cossotto et al) for fine versions of Stiffelio,
Il Corsaro, Un Giorno di Regno and I Due Foscari. We also get a superlative Oberto with Samuel Ramey plus both I Lombardi and its revision as Gerusalemme.

Add to that the Solti recording of the Requiem with Sutherland, Horne, Pavarotti and Talvela, plus choral music and orchestral rarities from Chailly, songs with the likes
of Margaret Price and Renata Scotto, and odds and ends of chamber music, excised ballets and revised arias… and you have as complete and fulfilling a set as you are likely to come across this year.
Viva Verdi!