[Steven Blier discovers what we-all have long known and cherished]

   Recordings in Review
   Steven Blier
   The Yale Review

   The news from the recording industry has not been encouraging.  But
   for aficionados of serious music the effects of the belt-tightening
   have been positively dire.  Major labels are issuing fewer and fewer
   new releases, the big chain stores are downsizing their classical
   departments, and the independent stores, once the lifeline for
   classical distributors, have disappeared altogether.  Even though
   the record companies' meager offerings favor vocal music over orchestral
   and chamber works, we serious lovers of singing still feel the hardest
   hit.  Because we used to be tempted each month by a dazzling array
   of new releases, the slowdown in the industry is a big adjustment
   for us.  We're the most avid of collectors.  We love to hear beautiful
   performances, but we also treasure records simply for their oddness,
   their rareness, and the memories they evoke.

   The ethos that once produced the kind of records we now treasure no
   longer exists.  In the not-so-distant past, record executives viewed
   classical recordings as a long-term investment - something like fine
   wine or paintings, expected to achieve full value several years after
   their release.  Those days are over.  Younger executives, anxious to
   sell their product quickly, have replaced the old guard of record
   producers.  Now sales are scrutinized more on the time frame of
   movies, which succeed or fail according to the box office take on
   their opening weekend.  The shelf life of new recordings is appallingly
   short.  When pop tenor sensation Andrea Bocelli started to outsell
   Luciano Pavarotti, a tyro A&R man wailed at a staff meeting, "What
   can we learn from this? What does this mean?" An older, more experienced
   manager broke the silence.  "Well, it's simple.  Blind trumps fat."

   For dyed-in-the-wool collectors, there's another truism:  "Live trumps
   studio." Modern recordings are like movies, spliced from a number of
   sessions.  Editing is nothing new, of course - even Maria Callas's
   classic recordings were pieced together to some extent.  But digital
   technology has made the snips and pastes more facile and more invisible.
   You can punch in all the high notes from one session, and put the
   rest together measure by measure from other takes if need be.  (I
   know this firsthand.  Choosing takes for a song on one of my own
   recordings, I remarked, "It's the best way I never played it!") The
   microphone can make a small, attractive voice sound like a big,
   imposing voice - if you're not listening too critically.  Technology
   has even made it unnecessary to have the cast of an opera together
   at one time.  On the recent recording of Carlisle Floyd's Susannah,
   Cheryl Studer was apparently never in the studio with the other
   singers.  Because of a scheduling conflict, she dubbed in the title
   role later.  One wonders if she could also be dubbed out of the
   performance so that tomorrow's voice du jour could be spliced in at
   some future date, at little cost to Virgin Classics.

   It's no wonder that the real excitement among opera fanatics has
   been generated not by the shiny new Thais with Renee Fleming or, God
   forbid, by the depressing new Boheme with the sweet, slender-voiced
   troubadour Bocelli, but by a new series of CD-ROMs created by an
   opera-lover named Mike Richter.  Over the past forty years Richter
   has amassed a huge collection of rare recordings from both broadcasts
   and live, in-house sources.  He also has developed a network with
   collectors around the world, pooling their resources (and their
   chutzpah) with his own vast anthology of more than seventeen thousand
   recorded performances.  As a collector, he's one of the best informed
   and most enthusiastic.  But he brings something else to the table
   that's unusual for an opera fanatic:  he has sophisticated technical
   skills that he learned at his day job as an engineer.  He hit on the
   idea of using CD-ROMs to make his collection available to the public.
   One disc can hold forty or fifty hours of music.  Richter calls them
   "audio encyclopedias" and offers them as an easy way to gain access
   to the history of recorded singing.  Because the sound reproduction
   in this medium is more compressed than on a conventional compact
   disc, he likens his CD-ROMs to prose synopses of Shakespeare plays,
   a quick way to grasp the outline while bypassing its subtleties.

   Don't take this at face value.  The historical material and the live
   recordings don't have the sonic beauty of stereo recordings to begin
   with, so the tubbiness of the sound caused by the loss of high and
   low frequencies isn't as serious as it might be with glossier-sounding
   source material.  Perhaps the early recordings would sound better
   transferred to compact discs, but the primitive sound of 78s generally
   makes an excellent transition to the compression of the newer medium.
   The broadcast materials sound pretty decent, though a bit congested.
   The in-house tapings are variable, and some may become a little tiring
   to listen to for long stretches.  Richter's CD-ROMs are in monophonic
   sound, even in the few cases where stereo sources are available.  On
   my laptop player, there is an intermittent background whirr and
   whistle that sometimes creates the odd sensation of hearing opera
   singers perform in a dentist's office.  Mostly, however, the sound
   is up to the task.  The timbres of the voices and the sense of style
   emerge loud and clear.

   The first two CD-ROMs I bought were a compendium of nineteen French
   operas broadcast over thirty-five years, from the 1940s to the
   mid-1970s, and an anthology of twenty-one pirated performances from
   the Bavarian State Opera in Munich from the 1970s and 1980s.  Issued
   on conventional CDs they would easily eat up a yard of shelf space.
   In this format, they are so small that I managed to misplace them in
   my apartment.  One of the issues for self-indulgent collectors is
   storage space; in my household, which has the appearance of a library
   organized by smart but unruly children, Mike Richter has attained
   hero status.  He has brought order to my obsession.

   This product comes with no cover art, not even a jewel box.  The
   silver discs arrive in a plain white envelope with embossed titles
   as identification.  For $8.50 per disc (including postage), you don't
   get frills.  When you start.  up the CD-ROM, you are greeted by the
   equivalent of liner notes and simple graphics:  a home page with the
   program, cast lists, and technical information.  There are biographies
   of many of the artists, and Richter supplies complete librettos for
   some of the rarer pieces, such as Ernest Reyer's Sigurd.  A warning:
   if you are an opera-lover, make sure you have nothing pressing on
   your schedule, because you're certainly gooing to have to kiss the
   next two hours good-bye.  The musical array is staggering.  Among
   the operas on the French disc are Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlos in the
   original French with an excellent.  cast; complete Penelope (Gabriel
   Faure's only full-length opera) with the great Regine Crespin in her
   early prime; an intense reading of Edouard Lalo's Le roi d'Ys, recorded
   during the darkest hours of World War II; and an appendix with a
   variety of Italian arias and ensembles mostly sung in French
   translations.  The recordings are taken from studio broadcasts made
   for the Office de Radio Television Francaise (ORTF), which was the
   primary documenter of French opera and French singers (just as the
   Metropolitan's live broadcasts became the standard-bearers in the
   United States).

   I was planning on channel-surfing my way through lots of short
   excerpts, starting with the French disc.  My first choice was Crespin
   singing the Act 2 aria from Mozart's Cosi fan tutte - breathtakingly
   beautiful in the cantilena, pretty clumsy in the coloratura imperfect
   and vastly enjoyable.  I then tried Teresa Stich-Randall singing the
   Act 2 duet from La traviata with Gabriel Bacquier.  The soprano was
   a true eccentric:  she had a white, instrumental timbre and a fast,
   very narrow vibrato like a sewing machine.  The combination of her
   voice, which was cold and under tight control, and her nature, which
   was hot and passionate, often made her seem a bit mad.  Her Violetta
   is at once bizarre and unbearably touching.

   Drunk on the new possibilities of operatic pointing-and-clicking,
   I planned to dip briefly into each of the complete operas.  Then
   something odd happened.  I got caught up in the immediacy and
   spontaneity of Don Carlos and wound up listening to practically
   the entire first act.  The singing is consistently good, if not
   transcendently beautiful.  But the performance has something that
   recent studio recordings don't have, even though they are more
   glamorously cast and alluringly recorded:  a dramatic trajectory,
   honest investment in the work, an urgency and a sense of risk that
   you can rarely achieve in a commercial studio where digital editing
   often splices out the excitement as well.  Most of all, these French
   performances have a suavity of style and a linguistic clarity that
   are staggering.  You don't hear French music sung like this anymore.
   On the international scene, Jose van Dam may be the only extant
   representative of this rarified school.  The musical phrasing is both
   broad and graceful; the ability to combine these qualities today
   seems to be a lost art.  And if you speak French, you really won't
   need a libretto to understand the words, either to the native French
   operas or to the ones offered in translation.  Every word of Mozart's
   Idomenee (ne Idomeneo) is crystal clear, and for extra value, it's
   served up here in the rarely heard adaptation Richard Strauss fashioned
   in the 1930s to make the piece more accessible to the audiences of
   his day.

   I repeated this experience with almost every item on the French
   CD-ROM.  I have heard plusher voices in Les contes d'Hoffmann, but
   Renee Doria and Charles Richard sing the piece with an elegance and
   clarity that have all but disappeared from our musical world.  The
   sinuousness of the line, the forward quality of the diction, and the
   transparency of the musical texture are a kind of Paradise Regained.
   There's drama, too:  Andre Pernet is magnificently creepy in the
   villain roles, especially Coppelius, which he sings in a heavy German
   accent.  The effect must have been disturbing for the French public
   in 1946, and it still packs an uncanny punch more than fifty years
   later.

   The Bavarian State Opera CD-ROM offers different delights.  Where
   the French broadcasts preserve a lost school of music-making carefully
   maintained over several generations, the Munich performances feature
   the big, cushy international style more prevalent these days.  Although
   these didn't offer the same sort of world-rocking surprises as the
   ORTF material, there is a lot of pleasure to be had from hearing
   stars like Mirella Freni, Edita Gruberova, Francisco Araiza, and the
   underrecorded Margaret Price in their glorious prime.  Carlos Kleiber,
   one of opera's most subtle, colorful, and buoyant conductors, is at
   the helm for Fledermaus, Boheme, and Traviata.

   The sense of theatrical urgency again kept me listening far longer
   than time really allowed.  The performances were taped in the theater.
   You hear the odd suppressed cough from a nearby ...  [text missing]
   ...  especially when they are in their middle register.  The bottled-up,
   sometimes glaring recorded sound might take a little getting used
   to, but if you are accustomed to hearing live music, there is a
   certain pleasure in hearing a true voice-orchestra balance instead
   of the artifical one created in the studio.  The bloom of Freni's
   high B at the end of the Faust "Jewel Song" has a triumphant excitement
   precisely because it wasn't created by an engineer.  She's using her
   own God-given public address system (although she seems to be singing
   the piece in Esperanto).  Ditto the startling brilliance of Gruberova's
   Queen of the Night in Zauberflote, done, as it were, in one unedited
   take.  It's not quite as perfect as her several studio performances,
   but hearing her confident, resonant passagework you know why this
   woman is a legend.  You also get a sense of the true size and weight
   of her voice, which is, need I add, staggering.

   Mike Richter has also produced a number of thematic recitals.  They
   carry a slightly higher price tag.  For $14.95, you can buy "Stars
   of David," which offers several cuts each by a wide range of Jewish
   singers, from cantors like Moshe Kusevitzky to opera divas like Evelyn
   Lear to operetta stars like Fritzi Massary.  The singing provides
   most of the pleasure, but I must report I was fascinated simply to
   read the list of artists.  Could that be the same Maria Ivogun who
   was Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's teacher and herself a great favorite
   during the Third Reich? Yep, her father was Jewish, a fact she kept
   well hidden during the Nazi era.  The big stars, the connoisseur's
   favorites, and the truly obscure all rub shoulders on this compendium,
   in repertoire ranging from cantorials to arias to art songs.

   "Men of Empire" features a raft of tenors, baritones, and basses from
   the British Isles, all born before 1900.  Richter dwells lovingly on
   certain famous voices like John McCormack, who gets forty-nine tracks
   to demonstrate the breadth of his artistry.  But there are many
   novelties, too, including Sir Charles Santley, who was born in 1834,
   studied with Gioacchino Rossini's protege Manuel Garcia, and recorded
   a smattering of songs and arias at the turn of the century when he
   was sixty-nine.  (Charles Gounod added the famous baritone aria "Avant
   de quitter ces lieux" to Faust especially for him.) I need hardly
   stress the delicious frisson created by hearing this man (born the
   year that Lucia di Lammermoor received its premiere) brought back to
   life on a laptop computer.  He probably learned "Non piu andrai" from
   The Marriage of Figaro (featured on the disc) a mere sixty years
   after Mozart wrote it.  Richter also offers, on a single CD-ROM, the
   first three volumes of The Record of Singing (here called "Singing
   on Record"), a historic compendium of operatic voices starting at
   the beginning of recorded sound, including the only extant recording
   of a castrato.  Compiled by Michael Scott, it was originally issued
   in six-LP boxed sets on the EMI label with lavish booklets including
   biographical material.  Because the recordings are in the public
   domain, Richter was able to make the first eighteen records available
   in this compact format at the rock-bottom price of $8.50, although
   he scrupulously doesn't include any of the copyrighted annotations.

   Richter's own productions, "Stars of David" and "Men of Empire," do
   have biographical material - concise, helpful, respectful but not
   reverential.  The salient features of each singer's training, career,
   and talent are brought to your attention without sugar-coating their
   shortcomings.  Richter not only has an extraordinary collection, he
   knows how to choose material to give a quick and flattering portrait
   of a singer's gifts.  In the British disc he writes of the bass Robert
   Watkin-Mills (1849-1930):  "Although lacking the voice or temperament
   for opera, Watkin-Mills fascinated his audiences with his Handelian
   runs and vocalization hurled out with force and clarity." Click on
   his recording of "Honor and Arms," and there it is - breathtaking
   coloratura runs like a virtuoso trombone player.  He may have been
   a one-trick pony, but what a trick!

   Richter's unerring judgment became particularly apparent to me in
   "Stars of David," which includes a number of singers I have heard
   in performance and have even accompanied in recital.  For the older
   singers, he uses rare 78s, and for the modern ones he mostly uses
   live performances - broadcasts and in-house tapings as well as
   television appearances.  To present Regina Resnik, he chose selections
   smuggled from a 1960 recital she did in Vienna.  (Resnik herself
   didn't own a tape of that concert; she wasn't offended at Richter's
   piracy, she just wanted him to send her a dub for her own collection.)
   1n just the few minutes it takes to hear Georges Bizet's "Ouvre ton
   coeur" you experience the essence of her talent - the...  [text
   missing] ...  confident delivery of intimate material.  You also hear
   some blowsiness, a touch of vulgarity, an overindulgence of tier
   baritonal chest register.  It's a wonderful representation of her
   voice, her supple musicality, and her tendency to overstate, and I
   guarantee you won't find this performance anywhere else.

   I then clicked on Marisa Galvany, who was a New York City Opera
   stalwart in the 1970s and 1980s and a Met second-stringer a little
   later on.  I remember her as an old-fashioned scenery-chewer with an
   impressive, unruly voice.  (Now in her sixties, she's switched down
   to mezzo-soprano roles and is singing with regional companies.  From
   what I hear, scenery is still not safe in her presence.) Richter has
   located a live, piano-accompanied performance of Odabella's entrance
   aria from Verdi's Attila, a bravura piece that exploits the extremes
   of a soprano's range at full dynamics without stinting on coloratura
   demands.  In other words, a big Geschrei.  Which is precisely what
   Galvany delivers - recklessly throwing her voice around the passagework,
   lofting the high notes, belting the low ones, she ends with a brilliant,
   sustained high E-flat that even Joan Sutherland (queen of the E-flat)
   would have envied.  And yes, it's a little sloppy and more than a
   little vulgar.  This was, after all, taped in the 1970s, when the
   "do your own thing" mentality had invaded even the world of opera.
   I miss those days of uninhibited singing, and I can tell Mike Richter
   does, too.  Michael Scott's "Record of Singing" is good as far as it
   goes, but "Stars of David" is a good counterbalance, a Semitic Candid
   Camera of opera - documenting singers caught in the act of being
   themselves, in all their brilliance and humanity.

   My mini-library has been traveling up and down the eastern seaboard
   with me all month.  (These discs are particularly great for train
   travel if you can get a seat near an AC outlet.) I have sampled the
   three volumes of live performances from the San Francisco Opera, a
   compendium of in-house tapings and broadcast material.  Volume 1
   earns its (admittedly none too steep) price with its inclusion of a
   1960 Aida starring Leonie Rysanek and Jon Vickers.  These two artists
   were known for the supercharged intensity of their performances; when
   they sang together, the effect was incendiary.  Although the sound
   quality is more listenable than the Munich tapes, it isn't close up
   and intimate.  Much of Irene Dalis's Amneris has to be taken on faith,
   since.  her dryish sound does not always get over the orchestra.
   Not so with the soprano and tenor.  In this recording you get a
   visceral sense of how these big, brilliant voices rang out and filled
   the hall.  Their duets have a desperate erotic charge, palpable even
   through the sonic limitations and mechanical gurglings.  (NB:  if
   you have issues about getting emotional in public places, be careful
   where you listen to this one.  I came close to bursting into tears
   on the Metroliner when I played Act 3 of this performance.)

   But wait, there's more.  Some of the highlights of volume 2 include
   Beverly Sills in Manon (partnered by Nicolai Gedda) and Lucia (with
   the young, pre-Three Tenors Pavarotti).  Sills's voice was in peak
   condition during these performances, which are far better sung than
   the commercial recordings she made of those operas.  It was a delight
   to rediscover the voice and the theatrical vitality that enthralled
   me when I first heard her in my teens.  Scroll and click, and you
   can sample Sutherland's sterling Rosalinde in a 1973 Fledermaus;
   Evelyn Lear and her husband, Thomas Stewart, in a heartbreaking
   English-language Eugene Onegin conducted by Charles Mackerras; the
   irreplaceable Renata Scotto in Butterfly.  Among the twenty-two operas
   on volume 3 are a thrilling Jenufa from 1980 with Sena Jurinac and
   Elisabeth Soderstrom; Peter Grimes with Vickers; Francis Poulenc's
   La voix humaine with the evergreen sexagenarian Magda Olivero; and
   Werther pairing a twenty-six-year-old Jose Carreras with Maria Ewing
   when she was still a fresh-voiced mezzo-soprano.

   Richter has an interest in Russian opera, and he offers two CD-ROMs
   devoted to performances from the Soviet Union.  One is a library of
   fourteen works ranging from cornerstone pieces like Boris Gudonov
   (in three performances) to rarities like Eduard NApravnik's Dubrovnik.
   The other is a collection of broadcasts of standard European works
   in Russian translation.  The first of these discs is indispensable
   - mostly good broadcast sound, helpful annotations, fine performances.
   The second is a collector's curiosity - the bulky, sonorous music
   making-tends to avoid the gossamer at all costs, and not everyone
   needs to hear Mozart recitatives or Rossini's rapid-fire finales sung
   in Russian.  But they'd be missing some glorious singing - Galina
   Vishnevskaya in Falstaff and Fidelio; Ivan Koslovksy as both Christoph
   von Gluck's Orfeo and of Rossini's Lltaliana in Algeri.  If these
   names don't get your blood racing now, they will after you've heard
   them sing.

   Perhaps the biggest buzz has been created by Richter's Wagner and
   Strauss encyclopedias:  he's put the complete operas of these composers
   on one disc each.  I'm slightly allergic to Wagner, so I gave that
   one a miss, but I have spent some time with the Strauss CD.  I have
   a few reservations about it.  The dense, complicated orchestration
   of these pieces doesn't cotton to the in-house tapings, and the
   nuances of the singing get lost in the murk on some of the performances.
   This is the downside of handheld microphones:  to enjoy the recordings
   you need some prior acquaintance with the music, because your inner
   ear has to supply the missing clarity.  Unless you already know the
   beauty and excitement of Strauss's music, you might find it all a
   bit noisy.  But the disc remains an excellent reference album, and
   the lyrical moments come through pretty well, like the Schwester-duett
   from Arabella sung by Lucia Popp and Julie Kaufmann.  Some of the
   operas seem to be from better-sounding broadcast sources (or just
   more expensive seats), especially Die Schweigsame Frau with Reri
   Grist sounding fresh and alluring in the killingly high writing of
   the title role.  It's a tribute to Richter's taste and depth of field
   as a collector that even when the recorded sound couldn't do full
   justice to the work, I still found it hard to tear myself from the
   performances.  I may have been struggling to hear Lucia Popp's
   Marschallin and Arabella, roles she never recorded commercially, but
   it was worth the fight.

   A few other caveats:  the recital albums are compelling, but you can
   play only one selection at a time, much as if you were listening to
   78-rpm sides.  As unwieldy as LPs now seem, you can at least sit back
   and hear a parade of song rather than a series of three minute squibs.
   Richter tries to be scrupulous about getting performances at the
   correct pitch, but there are very occasional failures.  It was
   frustrating to find large sections of a Kiri Te Kanawa - Geraint
   Evans - Frederica von Stade Figaro a half-step sharp, and the third-act
   Rosenkavalier trio with Popp is a little under A440.  But in hours
   of listening, those were the only major lapses I found; I had never
   used my computer to listen to music until I got hooked on these
   CD-ROMs.  Though I wasn't looking for yet another...  [text missing]
   ...worth the enslavement.  Unless you have good speakers connected
   to your machine, these recordings will be a private experience.  You
   can't easily share the music with other people except by passing
   headphones around like a joint.  On the other hand, I was thrilled
   to discover that I could actually groove to Monserrat Caballe in
   Semiramide while I wrote e-mail or typed in receipts on my accounting
   program.  For other novices, here's a bit of practical advice:  make
   sure you turn off the sound features of any programs you decide to
   use concurrently with your CD-ROM player.  When I innocently logged
   an expense and pushed "Enter" on my Quicken program, I was greeted
   with a "Ka-CHING" that would have wakened the dead - and almost gave
   myself a heart attack.

   Richter's taste and commitment gave us fanatics something to
   cling to as we witness with astonishment the ever-quickening and
   ever-more-painful implosion of the classical recording industry.
   Major orchestras have lost their big-label contracts and are now
   self-producing.  EMI has phased out one of their classiest lines,
   Erato, and I hear that another, Teldec, is destined for the chopping
   block.  According to a recent article by music journalist Norman
   Lebrecht, Tower Records is in deep financial trouble and is insisting
   on steep discounts and 360 days' credit from suppliers.  The small,
   independent labels that we now rely on for the preservation of our
   musical culture can't meet these impossible terms.  Meanwhile the
   indies passed up a valuable opportunity last year to unite in a single
   dot-com site, which would have given them the marketing strength to
   overcome the manipulations of the powerful chain stores.  I knew we
   had hit an all-time low when I was in the opera section of Tower, a
   soundproofed sanctuary for maniacs like myself, and stumbled on a
   display of Charlotte Church CDs.  A pre-pubescent girl with a voice
   like a theramin is not to be confused with a real singer.

   The future of music commerce would seem to lie in the Internet.
   Although Napster and MP3s have been the beginning of a revolution in
   one sphere of music marketing, maverick producers like Mike Richter
   play an important role in distributing the treasures of our musical
   past.  You can sense the man's intelligence, his dedication, and his
   integrity in the discs he produces.  I doubt that he can singlehandedly
   stop the insidious dumbing-down of classical music purveyed by major
   labels.  But perhaps his success will inspire other alternative ways
   to keep making great music and great performances available to the
   public.  As the corporate giants commit classical suicide, the silver
   lining may be that performers, opera companies, orchestras, and
   music-lovers get to take the industry back into their own hands and
   restore true excitement and artistry to recorded music.

   To see the catalogue of Mike Richter's CD-ROMS, log on to his Web
   site at http://www.mrichtercom

Janos Gereben/SF
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