No time for nostalgia (at least not at Covent Garden)

Nostalgic opera goers often make the mistake of comparing the present (i.e. the last two or three years) with the entire history of recordings. Quite naturally, the result of such an unfair comparison is a rather bleak picture of the present. The handful of good tenors we have nowadays, for example, cannot possibly match the glory of the sum of every single opera star from Enrico Caruso to Plácido Domingo. Worse still, when singing live, our tenors cannot possibly match the wonders of studio recordings, carefully improved by legions of sound engineers. For the nostalgic, therefore, attending an opera performance becomes an ordeal: every time the tenor does this or that, they will remember that recording from 1947 in which John Johnson sang the first aria better and, twenty minutes later, that other 1978 recording of Martin Martins in…