Placido Domingo has effectively and prolifically recorded for a number of labels, both "major" and "minor." For any one of them to come forward with a package purporting to be The Very Best of Placido Domingo is presupposing a lot. Although a few of the recordings in this two-disc compilation come from the early '70s, the vast majority are late-career performances from the 1980s and 1990s. Domingo took care of his instrument longer than practically any other male singer in the late twentieth century; that said, this two-disc set is not so much Domingo's "very best" as it is some of the better performances from a period where he was a little past his prime. In short, The Very Best of Placido Domingo is not bad, but Domingo himself has done better. The range of the material included here is truly impressive: here are excerpts from French, Russian, and Italian opera and Wagner, Mozart, Viennese operetta, zarazuelas, a Tchaikovsky song, and even a vocal version of the Finnish tango Jalousie. About the only areas of Domingo's artistry not explored here would be his work as a non-singing conductor and as a pop singer, although Philips admittedly seems to have a stranglehold on Domingo's cataloge in that vein. It is a mixed bag nonetheless, as Domingo is clearly straining in some spots, trying to turn corners that he's having to drag his voice around. Even in the 1990s Domingo could still well outsing his brethren in the Three Tenors (Pavarotti and Carreras), but it's not certain that an entire collection drawn from the recordings of that time is quite what the doctor ordered -- and this certainly does not represent Domingo at his "very best."

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