Recording in Italy

On summer evenings in Italy, the crowds jostle into the famous outdoor arenas--Rome's Baths of Caracalla, Naples' Arena Flegrea--to inhale great draughts of Verdi. Puccini, Rossini and Menotti. But better opera is sung every summer in the country's storied opera houses--to empty stalls and batteries of condenser microphones. Up and down the peninsula last week the record companies were tuning the mikes -to the golden sounds that will burst on buyers' ears next season.

This wholesale invasion of Italy's music houses is an annual event for U.S. and European record companies. Costs are lower ($8 an hour for a violinist v. $42 in the U.S.), the big stars are on hand for Europe's summer festivals and therefore easier to get at, glamour names like La Scala Orchestra and Chorus help to boost sales back home. Philips, Columbia's European affiliate, has snapped up the San Carlo Opera House in Naples, HMV-Angel has moved into Milan's La Scala and London-Decca into Florence's Teatro Co-munale. One of the busiest of all this year is Rome's cavernous Teatro dell'Opera, where RCA Victor is at work on new versions of Butterfly, Tosca, Orfeo and Lucia.

Ready, Maestro? For Victor, as for any company recording during the summer festival season, the toughest problem is one of simple logistics: how to get singers, orchestra, engineers and equipment in the same place at the same time. Victor's chartmakers spent all winter planning recording schedules. The company transformed the Rome Opera's marble-floored foyer into a sound booth lined with $50,000 worth of triple-track tape recorders, loudspeakers, amplifiers and oscillators. With promotion and distribution costs, Victor figures to sink $250,000 in Butterfly with a relatively unknown cast of young singers headed by Philadelphia-bred Soprano Anna Moffo, $250,000 in Tosca, which features such established names as Soprano Zinka Milanov (Tosca), Tenor Jussi Bjoerling (Cavaradossi), Baritone Leonard Warren (Scarpia).

Tosca and Butterfly (both conducted by Erich Leinsdorf) were recorded on alternate days, and between them they required more than 40 hours of taped singing. Inside the opera house, the red plush boxes were empty, dust covers lined the balustrades. A 62-piece orchestra was spread over the stripped main floor, and a 30-voice chorus was onstage. The principals stood at the music stand in bright cotton prints or sports shirts and slacks. In the control foyer Music Director Richard Mohr and the technicians hunched over the controls.

"Ready, maestro?" Mohr would say into the mike. "Very quiet, please. Take One ... Take Two . . . Take Three." In Butterfly the takes sometimes lasted less than a minute, sometimes ran for as much as twelve minutes. Later, in the control foyer, the singers listened in anguish to the playbacks while Mohr kept up a running commentary: "That's too heavy there, Anna; in the next line you can be as tragic as you wish. You're weighing it down a little, maestro. Diction, diction. It's ECCO, Anna, not echo. We must hear every word."

Emotion in Bits. In the wilting midsummer heat, tempers flared. After repeated retakes of a scene in Tosca which she ends on high C. Soprano Milanov snapped, "My God. high Cs don't grow on trees," later shouldered her way offstage with the candid remark, "I'm no chicken any more." Crumped Baritone Warren: "Recording is the worst job in music. You have to put over emotion in bits and pieces, and all the time you feel you're singing not for the evening but for always." At the end of two grueling weeks, Mohr listened to a final Tosca playback, commented: "It's beautiful, no buts."

By summer's end the busy recorders will have produced a rich harvest of Italian opera. HMV-Angel has recorded Turandot (with Callas and Giuseppe Di Stefano), plans to record Manon Lescaut. Philips-Columbia is doing Boheme, Don Pasquale, Linda di Chamounix, Tosca, Moses. In addition to its Rome operas, Victor has commissioned London-Decca to record Gioconda and Cavalleria Rusticana for its account.

To the laboring summertime singers, it all makes the regular opera season seem quite a nice vacation.

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