Old songs resung. (Coda).

I spent most of a recent long holiday weekend reliving my youth, courtesy of Decca Music Group. No, Decca hasn't developed a new time-travel machine, mind-expanding potable or rejuvenating cream. It was Decca's new series of multimedia CDs, The Singers, that transported me back to the days when I was first discovering opera on records and at the Met, in the early 1970s. The trip, alas, wasn't entirely pleasant.

The Singers currently features twenty artists, not all of them standard Decca back-catalogue titans: Although the roster includes a heaping portion of those superstars from the LP era frequently resurrected on CD (Pavarotti, Sutherland, Tebaldi, Del Monaco, Ghiaurov, Nilsson, Berganza), the series also boasts some fine artists not often treated to solo reissue discs (Danco, Janowitz, Talvela), a few welcome pre-LP legends (Berger, Leider, Teyte) and a surprisingly large clutch of important singers primarily associated with other labels (Corelli, Sills, di Stefano, Prey, Tourel, Lon don, Leontyne Price), who were occasional visitors to the Decca studios or (as in the case of Sills) whose old non-Decca recordings have now been bought by Decca.

So far, so good. These are all singers whose voices I know and admire, and I was eager to hear them in what Decca trumpets as "new digital transfers," so I could re-acquaint myself with artists I first applauded thirty years ago. Where to start? I opted for the disc devoted to Franco Corelli (467918), an artist who, in the days before the Three Tenors, was the tenor: a charismatic, handsome hero who looked as good as he sounded. Too bad The Singers doesn't begin to do him justice.

The Corelli disc, like all the others in the series, lives in a sharp, snappy package, with copy kept to a minimum. There's a track listing, and that's pretty much it. Six of the eight tracks listed on the back of the Corelli CD are duets, but you'll have to buy the CD to find out that his Desdemona in "Gia nella notte densa" is Teresa Zylis-Gara (in a performance recorded live at Rudolph Bing's 1972 Met farewell gala), or that Renata Tebaldi is his partner on three of the other cuts. Oops. Not a word on the outside about who Corelli was, or what he meant to opera fans in the 1950s, `60s and `70s. How does Decca expect to get its hand into the wallets of a new generation of opera fans without selling this stuff?

The booklet essay that accompanies the CD talks affectionately about Corelli but doesn't explain (or justify) the program's peculiar repertory choices. The only cuts that offer a jolt of the fabled Corelli electricity are the two Tosca arias, taken from the complete 1967 recording with Maazel; no other Cavaradossi ever vaulted into the first ...