Just Like Yesterday, Only Better

Opera Reissues Turn Back the Clock and Turn Up the Sound Quality

Technology to the rescue. Given the spectacular cost of making new recordings of familiar operas, we are likely to continue to listen to the great singers of the past -- and sometimes even the far-distant past -- in ever-grander and better-sounding reissues.

It really is amazing, after all, to put on a recording by Enrico Caruso that was made in 1920 and have it sound as though the tenor, dead 85 years now, is in the next room. But such is the experience of listening to the complete Caruso recordings in their latest 12-CD incarnation on Naxos Records, as transferred by the producer Ward Marston.

Marston has his own label, too, which contains discs by many less familiar voices from 100 years ago ( http://www.marstonrecords.com ). Ever heard of Francisco Viñas (sometimes spelled Vignas), who lived from 1863 to 1933, an elegant Catalan tenor who was equally at home in the Italian repertory and in Richard Wagner? Now you can have his complete recorded legacy on three CDs, four hours' worth, thanks to Marston.

Once we move into the 1950s, with the huge improvement of sound quality made possible by the invention of magnetic tape, there are numerous discs that could have been made yesterday, had we but the singers! One of the late Georg Solti's first great opera recordings was that of Richard Strauss's "Arabella," which is too often dismissed as a secondhand rewrite of "Der Rosenkavalier" but is, in fact, a work of considerable musical and intellectual interest. It has now been issued as part of a two-CD set called "The Originals" on Decca and the splendid cast includes Otto Edelmann, Lisa della Casa, Hilde Gueden, Anton Dermota and George London (whom Washingtonians, in particular, will remember for his long-ago directorship of the Kennedy Center). Almost every singer on the album is now dead, yet here they all are, singing with brilliant vibrancy, now and forever.

Soprano Joan Sutherland is still with us, fortunately, and it has been a delight to make the acquaintance of her Violetta in Verdi's "La Traviata" again, in her recently reissued 1962 recording with Carlo Bergonzi as Alfredo and Robert Merrill as Germont, under the direction of John Pritchard (Decca, two CDs). Sutherland's quirks are well-known -- an occasional wan droopiness in her temperament, a seeming mistrust of consonants in her diction -- yet I find them easy to forgive, particularly when the voice is so opulent, agile and beautifully modulated. Who today could toss off the stratospheric "Sempre libera" with such spectacular aplomb?

Sutherland and Solti are also teamed in a reissue of Verdi's Requiem -- surely the most operatic of religious works -- on a two-CD set from Decca that also includes bass Martti Talvela, mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne and tenor Luciano Pavarotti, thrillingly accompanied by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.

Pavarotti turned "Nessun dorma!" from Puccini's "Turandot" into a hit single, but the best recording of the complete opera is still the one that RCA put together in 1959 -- with Jussi Bjorling at his most sun-splashed as Calaf, Renata Tebaldi at her most heart-breaking as Liu, and Birgit Nilsson as the formidable Princess Turandot, all steel, ice, fire and fury, simultaneously. The reissue (on two CDs, BMG) still sounds astonishingly fresh, although it is possible to imagine a more interesting reading of the orchestral music than Erich Leinsdorf summons from the Orchestra of the Rome Opera. Still, this is the "Turandot" you want.

The best music from George and Ira Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" is marvelous and hardly underappreciated. Whether or not the opera "works" as a whole is still a matter of debate: To this taste, there are a lot of gray and dreary passages to sit through while waiting for the hits. Still, for the curious or the convinced, it is good to have the first complete recording of the original 1935 production in a new recording from the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of John Mauceri (Decca, two CDs). Alvy Powell is a sympathetic and strongly sung Porgy, with Marquita Lister a stirring, full-voiced Bess.

Pascal Dusapin's "Perela Uomo di Fumo" ("The Man of Smoke," two CDs, Naive) is probably the most stirring, original and eerily beautiful opera to come along since the early stage works of Philip Glass. Dusapin is gifted with the same ear for lush, shifting, plummy sonorities that we admire in the works of Pierre Boulez, yet he does not fall into the trap of overloading his own music with the manifold complexities that sometimes grow wearisome from the older composer. Indeed, Dusapin specializes in taut, reiterated sonic modules that expand and contract like images in a kaleidoscope. Imagine August Strindberg's "Dream Play" as it might have been set by a decidedly French composer evoking a universe of hallucination (Debussy on acid, perhaps) and you'll have some idea of "Perela Uomo di Fumo" -- as mysterious and smoky as it sounds.

Finally, Deutsche Grammophon issued a five-CD set titled "Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart: A Musical Portrait" only a month before the great bass-baritone died of a heart attack in September. It is a beautiful tribute, featuring the couple (they were married for half a century) in solo music and duets. The music ranges from the ultra-familiar (Stephen Foster's "Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair") to the distinctly unusual (a fine "Te Deum" by the all-but-forgotten Otto Nicolai).