One can hardly believe there is still a debate! - "Nussun Dorma" may have become Pavarotti's singature tune (and he does sing it magnificently), but Sutherland is all wrong in the title role, and with Leinsdorf achieving near Wagnerian power and passion delivered in great SACD stereo, this recording takes the cake.

Let there be no doubt: this is the recording to buy. - Go get it!

I have been looking for a really good recording of Turandot and in so doing I have been collecting a few disappointments. This recording is one of them.

I have the Pavarotti/Sutherland copy and though Pavarotti does a real good job, in my opinion the rest of the cast falls short. Sutherland's style is not appropriate, Liu's sad music seems too cheerful.

So, this classic recording comes to my collection. The singing is really good. The singers emote proper feeling.

The orchestra performs like it's not even paying attention to the director. It really sounds like the brass is paying attention while the strings go on their marry way with whatever tempo inspires them. In some of the best sections of the opera the brass and strings perform nearly a half a second apart. It's awful.

At first I thought it was bad mixing of the stereo recording but everybody comes back together at points where musicians typically look up from their music and actually watch the conductor.

Good singing. Bad orchestral performance.

Though this recording is generally highly rated, the ease and arrogance with which a few reviewers have dismissed this historic performance leave one perplexed and saddened, wondering if perhaps Amazon's customer rating system is such a great thing after all.

Granted, the technology behind this early stereo recording is often less than exemplary, and the various LP pressings and CD issues have varied in quality. The current reissue seems as good as we are likely to get any time soon.

Despite these shortcoming, I really do wonder if some of the less than enthusiastic reviewers really understand what they are hearing when they hear these voices.

Certainly we have a wealth of great voices today, but there is no denying that with our global community, voices are beginning to sound more and more the same. This recording documents a different era, when regions and nations produced a unique sound.

This recording is a living testament to a time when Scandanavian voices (Nilsson and Bjoerling) rang free and open-throated with a particular brilliance in the upper register; when Italian sopranos (Tebaldi) sang with an exciting blend of Italianate bite and Mediterranean warmth and hue; when sopranos often produced pianissimos not by a mere reduction in volume, but by producing an uncanny, disembodied tone that floated. Listen to the confrontation between Turandot and Liu near the end of the opera to hear Tebaldi and Nilsson both produce this striking sound. The soft, warm tones seem suspended in space. Milanov could produce this sound; so could Caballe.

For this performance I can only feel gratitude. No one can objectively say that these roles have been performed better by other singers. Many, myself included, would insist that these performances are unsurpassed, perhaps even unequalled. At any rate, we are the beneficiaries of these great artists who, during the hot Roman summer of 1959, not only left behind a classic performance of this great work, but who also preserved on disc one of the greatest tributes to a great era of singing--an era that can only accrue in legend with each passing year.

I have heard this version in cassette (old times). The singing, of course, is the same high level. Nilsson, Tebaldi, and Bjoerling are really fabulous. The voices and the orchestra sounds as I never heard and never expected, after been remasterized. It is really incredible how clear is the sound, remarkable basses. But you need to have a SACD capable DVD player and surround sound music system to understand what I mean. Highly recommended and very cheap if it is considered the historical value and the great remasterization to SACD of this, one of the best Turandot available at the moment and maybe for a long long time because there are no singers like these anymore.

Nilsson's Turandot is reason enough the acquire this recording, but her later version for EMI is vocally and dramatically finer still. Bjoerling is a very good Calaf for the phonograph who probably couldn't have brought it off in the theater. As a lyric voiced Calaf, he doesn't pack the sheer visceral excitement of the Nilsson/Corelli pairing on EMI. Tebaldi is vocally bested only by her younger self in the early stereo Decca effort that also featured Inge Borkh and Mario del Monaco. She's pretty conventional on the dramatic side - for a real change of pace listen to Schwarzkopf's detailed characterization on EMI with Callas. Tozzi, in my opinion, is the best Timur on record. The Ping, Pang and Pong are nicely characterized and well sung. Leinsdorf's conducting is on the restrained side but very satisfying, bringing out a lot of orchestral detail.

The SACD includes the three channel mix, giving a theatrical perspective to the voices and orchestra. No rear channel fake ambiance, thank goodness. While this latest remastering betters the older Red Seal and Living Stereo incarnations of this venerable recording, it didn't come out as well as the other Living Stereo SACD opera sets released at the same time (Boheme, Butterfly, Traviata) despite its repuation over the years as a sonic blockbuster. The sound is still somewhat harsh and congested in places but probably as good as we'll get from the master tapes. Nevertheless, it is better sonically than Nilsson's later effort on EMI where the shrill recording doesn't do the outstanding performance justice.