Caruso’s “Amor ti vieta” (with piano accompaniment by the composer) is from 1902—still early in his international career, and four years before he and Cavalieri brought Fedora to the Met. He begins the aria softly, with widened vowels—the first four phrases, including the first upper G (“di non amar“) could almost be Bonci, with the vibrato simmered down. But then he fills the tone out, poco a poco, and builds the brief moment with all the richness, warmth, and ring (hence, beauty) that no tenor since has commanded. In that same year, Fernando de Lucia recorded the aria, and two years later the two Act 2 passages that can sensibly be excerpted, “Mia madre, la mia vecchia madre” and “Vedi, io piango.” De Lucia is always a trip for his sheer otherworldniness, and never more so than here. He is unlike any of his successors in his poetic dalliance with the music, and unlike any of his contemporaries in the basic conformation of his voice—not bright and open, calculated for maximum squillo, but governed by a heady darkness and designed for ultimate control over long, suspended phrases in assorted shades of mezza-voce, with a solidity in the low range that many baritones would envy. The degree of musical permissiveness he allows himself (and was allowed him by others) is extraordinary even by turn-of-the-century standards, and sometimes strikes me as so self-indulgent as to leave the piece at hand in ruins. But in de Lucia’s masterful voicings (the prerequisite for granting such permission), it lifts Giordano’s music into another sphere, and gives us a Loris quite different than any other, self-involved but aristocratic and erotically magnetic, a connoisseur of sensuality. That’s a different opera. As with a large portion of his recorded output, de Lucia sings these pieces below score pitch—a half-step down on the fine-sounding Marston transfers, though there is evidently some room for questioning.

An intriguing pairing is that of the soprano Giannina Russ with tenor Edoardo Garbin, who together recorded the money pages from “Vedi, io piango” to the end of Act 2. With Russ we know we are never getting anything like a full picture. Her voice was reportedly large and dramatic in quality, and she sang everything from Gilda (superb duets with Magini-Coletti) to Aïda and Norma. On records we hear a well-guided, well-balanced, girlish soprano of pure timbre, whose dramatic calibre was obviously of a different sort than the lush, roomy ones we’ve become accustomed to. She has a momentary tussle reaching the climactic top C here, but to the rest of the scene brings a firm, even line and a shining quality that has little to do with the manner then coming into vogue. (She also recorded the monologue, sounding rather tentative at first, but rounding into form as she goes along.) Garbin, unlike the quite effusive de Lucia or anyone else I’ve heard sing this music, starts almost matter-of-factly (no sobs for “Vedi, io piango“) but with great elocutionary clarity, and then brings out an upper range that is startlingly brilliant and meaty, yet in no way explosive or unbalanced.  From a contemporary perspective, it is worth pondering that this tenor, who debuted as the Forza Alvaro, was also the choice to “create” the part of Fenton.