Old Opera Records Get High-Tech Fix

The old song titled ``Everything Old is New Again'' has never been more accurate in the high-tech world of recordings - where the very latest in technology is sprucing up the very earliest masters for the delectation of music lovers everywhere.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in opera, where recordings made in the early years of this century are being reissued, from such labels as Angel and Nimbus.

The latter's ``Prima Voce'' collection is particularly fascinating to singers and lovers of great singing, because it makes accessible in digital sound, for the first time, those golden voices of the past who heretofore have just been names in the history books.

A good case in point is a Nimbus sampler disc called ``Great Singers 1909-1938,'' in which listeners will make the acquaintance of such singers as Tetrazzini, Caruso, Schumann-Heinck, Galli-Curci, McCormack, Stracciari, Ponselle, Lauri-Volpi, Turner, Tibbett, Supervia, Gigli, Anderson, Schipa, Favero, Muzio and Tauber, for a total of 75 minutes.

If you have heard the scratchy, dim LPs of early vocal recordings, you still haven't heard these voices. Using what has been termed a ``breakthrough in archive sound reproduction,'' the Nimbus discs are made with ambisonic transfer technology, which wipes out a lot of the surface noise while still preserving the immediacy of the voice itself.

The 78 rpm originals have been digitally remastered to allow

the subtleties of these great voices to come through - the elegant passagework of John McCormack in ``Il mio tesoro,'' and the extended diminuendo of Rosa Ponselle's high notes in ``Casta diva.''

The results still don't begin, of course, to approach modern standards of fidelity. There still is surface noise; there still are major sonic defects of various kinds, but you can really hear these voices, and discover what inspired all those enraptured contemporary accounts of these singers.

Another Nimbus disc, ``Divas,'' features famous women singers who were recorded 1906-1935 (including the divine Melba and Patti); other discs are devoted exclusively to such singers as Ponselle, Caruso, Gigli and Galli-Curci.

Meanwhile, Angel Records has been dipping liberally into its storehouse of great opera recordings, originally made in analog form and remastered digitally. In many cases, it's hard to distinguish the results from digital originals; the voices are kept front and center, but sound balances are excellent and surfaces are clean.

And the quality of the singing - well, a 1967 ``Aida'' with Zubin Mehta conducting Birgit Nilsson, Franco Corelli and Grace Bumbry should fall into anyone's category of ``discs worth preserving.'' Aida is not exactly Birgit Nilsson's signature role - but what a queenly Aida she was! Corelli's Radames is one thrill after another from that bright trumpet of a voice, with its formidable technical resources, including heart-stopping diminuendos and impassioned high notes. The young Bumbry, glorying in the rich mezzo-soprano tones and the easy top notes that made her such a stunning Amneris, is a real pleasure to hear.

Another golden name of the past, that of African-American tenor Roland Hayes, is immortalized in a new Smithsonian Institution disc of 23 classical songs, folk songs and spirituals. The recordings, made during the last 12 years of Hayes' career (he was active from the 1920s through the 1940s), originally were taped by a Boston record collector and audio engineer named Stephen Fassett. Most of the selections have never been released before.

Hayes' beautiful voice won him acclaim despite the most horrendous odds (no professional manager would represent him because he was black, despite his successes in Europe). It was through Hayes that African-American folk songs and spirituals rose to prominence on the concert stage and elsewhere (Hayes sang them for the English royal family at Buckingham Palace).

The new CD, ``The Art of Roland Hayes,'' covers an extremely wide range of material (from Purcell and Dowland through Schubert and ``Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,'' all sung with Hayes' noble and artful approach to music.