EMILIO DE GOGORZA - PRIMA VOCE CD

SKU/Barcode: 710357792229

If there is any reason to be glad for the resuscitated Nimbus label, which made a comeback after a number of years spent on receiver's index, it is Nimbus' Prima Voce volume for the magnificent baritone and recording pioneer Emilio de Gogorza. If any "historical" vocalist ever deserved a career survey and never really got one, not even on LPs, it was Gogorza. Two of Gogorza's LPs appeared on the obscure Cantilena label in Canada in the 1960s, and Pearl tried a single disc of Gogorza in the 1980s. While these were steps in the right direction, Gogorza was a singer active from 1901 to 1930 that made hundreds of recordings, so achieving a true career summary would be a great deal more difficult task than just putting together a number of his recordings that sound good. Ironically, Gogorza has appeared on CD quite a bit, but mostly in the context of his work with other singers -- Gogorza's work with Enrico Caruso has been re-released many times, and to a lesser extent so have his recordings with his wife, soprano Emma Eames. Four of those are included here, as is an astounding duet with Marcella Sembrich from 1907. Other than that, all of the 35 selections in this two-disc set, Emilio de Gogorza: Prima Voce, are his alone. Gogorza was one of the first recording artists in the disc era to make a lot of records; he began even earlier than Caruso or the all-time champion in terms of record singers in terms of sheer production, Henry Burr. Unlike Caruso, Gogorza lived to stay on records nearly as long as Burr. Gogorza needed the income, as his personal appearances were all in recital; his eyesight was so poor he could not perform in opera, and the one time Gogorza tried, it earned him a trip into the prompter's box. It was noted in contemporary reviews that Gogorza had a superb command of languages, particularly French and Spanish, and he recorded popular music under a number of pseudonyms, such as "Signor Francisco" in various languages. The first disc in this set consists of opera scenes and arias, and the second disc of songs, both classical and popular. It is a tremendously varied range of offerings, from Wagner's "Evening Star" from Tannh user (in German) to Sebastien Yradier's little ditty "La Paloma." Gogorza had an incredibly powerful voice -- Marcella Sembrich goes into a near apoplectic fit trying to get ahead of him in their duet from Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet, "Doute de la lumi re" -- but he used it to much deeper, expressive purposes than what was required of most "record singers" of his day. For a good example of this, sample his stunning "Promesse de mon avenir" from Massenet's opera La roi de Lahore. Some have derided the Nimbus "Ambisonic" process -- playing original records through a gigantic playback horn in a tiny, scale-model concert hall in Wyastone, England -- as technical quackery, however, there are at least two very good things about it. It really does cut down on the amount of static coming from the record, a problem with every direct, electronic transfer of vintage shellac recordings; this makes the experience more palatable to the average listener than typical "honest" transfers of vintage acoustical records. The other thing is that the resultant echoing sound -- the ambience of the "Ambisonic" hall -- really isn't that different from what one gets from using a typical noise reduction program, except that the reverberation at Wyastone is natural and the one in a de-noising program is an electronic artifact. Generally, Nimbus process works less well on electrical records than on acoustic ones, although there is at least one electrical record here that sounds glorious, a 1928 Victor test of Debussy's "Voici que le printemps" that features genuinely human and moving singing in Gogorza's late voice. Emilio de Gogorza: Prima Voce is a wonderful offering to anyone who cares about great, low-voiced male singers; however, one element indicates someone is asleep at the switch --