Anna Moffo's late recordings may be just sufficiently recent to introduce an automatic recoil at the sight of this. That would be unfair, for she sings well and characterizes sympathetically. To her credit, in the heyday of Callas and Sutherland she imitated neither. I would say (but don't know for a fact) that if she had a tonal ideal in her mind it might have been Zinka Milanov, for she herself produces a sound that, especially by contrast with her successor in the role on records, Beverly Sills (EMI—nla), is beautifully rounded, almost lush. On the other hand, Sills recorded it with quite remarkable dramatic vividness and insight, of which Moffo has precious little.
At her side (as at Sills's) is Bergonzi, who does something to make the performance memorable. His singing of ''Sulla tomba'' and ''Verranno a te'' has the stylistic refinement which so distinguished him among post-war Italian tenors, while his ''Maledetto'' in Act 2 is as fervent as the noisiest of them. Mario Sereni is a forgettable Enrico, Ezio Flagello a variable Raimondo whose best utterances are finely sonorous and pure-voiced. Pretre conducts a genial performance that is rarely moving (except in the sense that the singers spend a lot of time crossing from one speaker to the other). One claim to distinction is that it was the first recording to restore all the passages usually cut in performance, or, as Andrew Porter put it in his review of the original issue, to be ''completely complete''. Unfortunately the libretto omits one page and has two pages transposed.'