Voices Of Italian Opera

In 1902 the then fledgling five-year-old Gramophone Company recorded a young operatic tenor called Enrico Caruso in Milan and changed the perception of the gramophone from a novelty to a medium for the enjoyment of serious classical music. This collection of recordings of voices of the Italian opera tradition includes one of those historic 1902 Caruso recordings, which still holds its own today despite the extreme limitations of the acoustic recording process in use in those days, as part of a programme of the greatest singers from the years that followed, whose art was captured for ever through the medium of recorded sound that had been invented in 1877 by Edison using a rotating cylinder and then developed in 1887 by Emile Berliner who discovered how to record on a flat disc. The Gramophone Company went on to record all the great singers of the time and when it merged in 1931 with its great rival, the British Columbia company, to form EMI Ltd, it went on to develop a catalogue of operatic recordings unrivalled to this day. These five CDs present a sampling of the many outstanding voices captured on record by EMI over the past century in the field of Italian opera. Not all of the singers are Italian, but the tradition of performing ItaIian opera has been clearly defined over the years under the guidance of the composers themselves, and the performance style has been handed down to the present day by the great singers heard in this collection.

Price: $63.98