Twice-told tale.

Certain facts of life can be quite discouraging. One such fact for opera-lovers is that no singing voice, no matter how great, can be captured accurately on recordings. One can hear the difference of voices and singing methods between Callas and Tebaldi, Rise Stevens and Marian Anderson, Tucker and Gedda, Warren and Bastianini, Siepi and Christoff, but one cannot hear how each of these singers made a particular theater's walls vibrate in unique ways. If you've heard New York City Opera bass Norman Treigle only on records, you've never heard all of him. The engineers presented a mere shadow of his chameleonic Boito Mefistofde and missed much of the elegant authority of his Handel Giulio Cesare, which worked well onstage despite editorial butchery and vocal miscasting (alto or countertenor music sunk down to bass). Recordings registered about half the organ-diapason that baritone Leonard Warren could bestow on Verdi. And compared with what even the pre-Antony and Cleopatra Leontyne Price could achieve with Verdi in the opera house, some of her records insult her.

One cannot in all honesty, however, blame the Price problem entirely on the recording process. In her best years, her voice--a generous lyric soprano, but not a spinto, as The New Grove Dictionary of Opera contends (she never really pushed it)--wasn't truly phonogenic. Much of her voice's early beauty lay in the air that its well-controlled and varied power set in vibration. Her first Met performances, in 1961's Il Trovatore, gave a vivid example: the climactic crests of Leonora's Act IV aria, "D'amor sull'ali rosee." Even more of a thrill came soon thereafter, with her first Met Aida. The softly radiant high C and A in the dosing page of "O patria mia" were never again equaled by Price or by anyone else I've ever heard.

The difference between Price at her best in an opera house or on a concert stage and the lady on her finest recordings lay, it seems, in that lack of enhancing air-space, something that the engineers are powerless to supply. This article results partly from my memory of her live performances early, then mid-career and late, coupled with recent hearings of CD reissues of her two recorded Aidas. The first was recorded in 1961, when Price was thirty-four, at the Rome Opera House, with Georg Solti conducting that theater's chorus and orchestra and a cast that featured Rita Gorr, Jon Vickers, Giorgio Tozzi and Robert Merrill. The second was made in London in 1970, with Erich Leinsdorf conducting Grace Bumbry as Amneris, Placido Domingo as Radames, Ruggero Raimondi as Ramfis, Sherrill Milnes as Amonasro, the John Aldis Choir and the London Symphony. And perhaps just to help even the playing field, the legendary Richard Mohr produced both.

Between 1961 and 1970 came the big bump on Price's career-road: the 1966 Antony and Cleopatra, which inaugurated and nearly crippled the Met's new Lincoln Center supermarket (thanks to director and designer Franco Zeffirelli's Egyptological ambitions). More to the musical point, Samuel Barber told people he had composed Cleopatra's role for Price's Carmen voice. Having heard that rather foggy Bizet recording, I'm sure Graham Greene's Harry Lime would have called Barber's decision "unwise, Sam, unwise."

In view of what both Carmen and Cleopatra did to Price, it seemed easy to predict how the two Aida CDs would compare, especially considering how closely the earlier one followed that glorious first Met Aida. But hold your bets. Without the advantage of a big auditorium, in which the younger Price thrived, the Solti recording almost never finds her free of throatiness or slight huskiness, no matter how wonderfully she arches her phrases and how crisply she utters what Verdi called his parole sceniche. Then again, the 1970 discs still pour lots of vocal pea soup but retain some bright phrases from Price, yet with too much unsteadiness of line.

A scene-by-scene comparison of the two Price performances is useful. The first scene's trio among the ...