Classical file

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 11, 2000

CARUSO 2000: DIGITAL RECORDINGS (RCA) -- Digital technology has come to 16 of the most famous solos of Enrico Caruso, whose records were made before electricity transformed the recording process. This millennial makeover is not as ghastly as you might imagine. In fact, Caruso 2000 offers what seems like a reasonable facsimile of how the great Italian tenor actually sounded without the wretched little bands and surface noise of the early wind-up recordings.

Skepticism is understandable, because this sort of thing was tried before in the 1930s, when RCA Victor doctored Caruso's original 78 rpm records to try to add a symphony orchestra and eliminate scratches and pops, with ghoulishly synthetic results. This time around, his performances of arias by Verdi, Meyerbeer, Puccini, Rossini and others, recorded between 1906 and 1920, have been digitally plucked from the old discs and joined with new accompaniments by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gottfried Rabi.

It's a fascinating project on a number of fronts, both technological and musical. For example, the Vienna RSO, accustomed to playing at a pitch of 443 hertz, had to adapt its instruments to the pitch of Caruso's day, about 438 hertz. That was no small problem.

Then there were the accommodations Rabi and the orchestra players, listening through earphones only to Caruso's voice without the original accompaniment, had to make to the wayward tempos and phrasing common a century ago when singers were expected to take artistic license with the score.

"While the old -- albeit clumsy -- accompaniment had enabled us to recognize the most subtle liberties taken by Caruso, its elimination made us feel like astronauts floating through space, without weight or direction," Rabi wrote in a liner note.

With his robust tenor, Caruso was the perfect Manrico in Il Trovatore, and Verdi's opera is represented by a pair of warhorses, "Di quella piro" and "Ah, si ben mio," sung with rich, easeful restraint. Several of the arias from the French operas Le Cid, La Juive and Manon are deeply moving.

Purists would argue that transfers from the original Victor 78s of Caruso are best, and there is a powerful sense of deja vu in them, crackling on shellac grooves and all -- perhaps even because of the old-fashioned atmosphere. But this great voice of the early 20th century deserves better.

As a comparison, Caruso 2000 contains two versions of the tenor's 1907 record of "Vesti la giubba" from I Pagliacci. There's no contest between the tinny, noise-plagued original and the cleaned-up digital remake, unless you value authenticity at the expense of listenability. Grade: B