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I become impatient with reviewers who lament “a lack of refinement and subtlety” in performers such as Corelli and Del Monaco in this opera. I nominated the 1969 Mehta recording in my “Untouchable” and ”Most Recommendable” Opera Recordings survey but that was a very personal choice and I concede that it is not perfect there are quite a few others to rival it.

The first two worthy of note were made, amazingly, over ninety years ago and the last in 2000 – but that is hors concours, being a rarity, the 1857 French version. There have been more than twenty studio recordings, most of which I review below, but I have excluded a few for reasons of manifest inadequacy (Bocelli as Manrico? Please…) or simply for not featuring the major voices required. The existence of around 200 recordings of Il trovatore suggests that it should be possible to find at least one or two which fulfil Caruso’s celebrated criterion that the only thing required for its success is “the four greatest singers in the world” but the ideal recording has proved elusive. A selective survey of Verdi’s Il trovatore