These are both second volumes in the Lebendige Vergangenheit series to be devoted to their respective artist, and the records in these collections were made in the same years, 1927-30. The singers were fellow countrymen and near contemporaries, de Luca (1876-1950) being nine years the senior. The reason for reviewing them together, however, is that they make such a striking contrast. As Pertile's art had developed by this time it had become the very antithesis of de Luca's.
To de Luca you go to hear phrases such as Rigoletto's ''Miei signori, perdono, pietate... Ah, vegliardo la figlia ridate'' and then ''Piangi, fanciulla, e scorrere fa il pianto sul mio cor'' sung with perfect evenness and ideal beauty of tone, the emotion felt as an implicit presence requiring no reinforcement by accentuation, quiver, gulp or sob. If one imagines Pertile singing those phrases (in his style of those years) it would be a very different tale: 'perdono' would have its aspirate, 'pietate' in all likelihood would have four aspirates and be introduced by some external show of emotion, the emphasis being redoubled in the second phrase. Perhaps it is not fair to put these things (so to speak) into his mouth, but you have only to hear what he does with the cantabile of ''M'appari tutt' amor'' from Martha to see the point. In such music his vocal line is like a tube with multiple perforations, a windy exhalation or frothy overflow emerging at each.
He had not always been like this, and that is why it is such a pity that the first two discs in his name (I reviewed the first volume in 9/90) should have drawn exclusively on the records of that period. Yet even here you cannot go for long without knowing that this was a man touched by greatness. The Lohengrin records are like a prayer answered, his Farewell to the swan a sublime piece of singing, and everything done with the genuine glory of Italian song that falls like a blessing on this music. Chenier's Improvviso has a poet's vision even if it is sometimes expressed in the raucous tone of the demagogue, while in the final duet some moments are exquisite. Always with Pertile, even at his worst, there is likely to come a moment of breathtaking imaginativeness.
That is not so with de Luca. Here the listener's breath may indeed be held, but it will be over a matter of pure singing: the fine rounding off of the verse in ''Di Provenza'', or the way in which solos that could easily be treated in the rough verismo style (the ''Pescator'' song in La Gioconda is one such instance) become an exemplary demonstration of energy contained within the singing line.
The recordings on both of these discs will be familiar to collectors (de Luca's duets with Galli-Curci, Rethberg and Gigli are there, and Pertile's Chenier and Manon Lescaut duets with Sheridan). The transfers are good, except that two on the de Luca (''Il balen'' and ''O Carlo, ascolta'' from Don Carlo) show signs of having been taken from a source other than the 78 original. When pitches are 'wrong' it is fairly safe to assume that the singer has transposed (though Pertile's ''Che gelida manina'' is so often sharp that one wonders why he bothered to put it down a semitone). The notes on de Luca are not very reliable: he sang in the Italian but not the world premiere of Griselidis, and his Sancho Panza to Chaliapin's Quixote was at the Metropolitan not Monte-Carlo; also, he can hardly be called ''leading baritone'' at the Metropolitan until 1946, as that was the year of his brief reappearance after an absence of every year but one since 1935. The final sentence of the note carries a warning: ''His [de Luca's] true stature will, however, only become clear to those listeners sufficiently discerning to enjoy a rarefied form of vocal culture''. So it's come to this. 'A rarefied form of vocal culture'. It used simply to be called good singing.'