The amount of excellent recordings is enormous and it also depends on the artistic goals of your director - and, I suppose, yourself. An absolute, gorgeous classic is Giulini with a magnificent quartet of singers; he pretty nearly set the standard. Fricsay's second of two recordings, conducted when he knew he was dying himself, is regarded as epoch-making, but it has a tendency to Germanize and symphonize Verdi that I don't approve of - though I'll excuse him, God rest his shade! With Toscanini you can't go wrong; any Verdi he directed is in contention. You might also consider Karajan and Muti.
The thing is that, unless you are really perverse or talentless, if you are any kind of musician at all, Verdi takes you by the hand and shows you how things are done. He had a gift for composing things that are immensely singable even when they are terribly difficult - Celeste Aida, is there anyone who hasn't at least tried to sing that? Even though it ends in a note that almost no human throat can sing? His emotion is clear, direct, honest and straightforward, and though his work always aimed for complexity and achieved it increasingly as he got older, it was a complexity without sophistication or deceit. I think that you will know what to do the minute you start reading it.
Well, many recordings are good; in fact, although I have listed three for whose high merit I can vouch, I don't remember hearing a really bad performance. And the work has space for very many kinds of excellence: the orchestra, the chorus, each of the soloists, all had space to shine. I guess if one of them is less than inspired, s/he can be pulled along wby the others.
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