The two hundred and third classical recording: #669 Giacomo Puccini - Gianni Schicchi
Operas always have a trickier task to judge purely as a recording. The Italian book here doesn't give me much of a story to go on, although a Wikipedia performance helps a lot to roughly keep track. The music gets harder to keep track of as a specific sound - while character leitmotifs appear, they can also be buried by the rest of the music, and setting the scene and the story means that parts of it can struggle to retain its identity. Here, the opera has a good footprint and while the score seems heavy, the voices really get a chance to shine with this. The humour doesn't always shine through in the music, this mostly coming from the lyrics instead. It's good, the piece works well, but in hindsight, it would have been better in context.