Just over five years ago EMI published their great Battistini edition ((LP) EX290790-3, 7/86), but it was evidently too good for this world and is no longer available. Preiser have now come up with an excellent selection of the operatic recordings, and it is good to report that they have been transferred to CD with all the qualities one wants to hear: clarity, presence and fidelity to the natural beauty of the voice. They confine themselves to the years 1906 to 1911, which means that there is nothing from the fabled Warsaw 1902 series and nothing to represent the later years, the remarkable vocal longevity, of a singer who made his last public appearance in 1927, and whose last records were made in 1924, in the month of his sixty-seventh birthday. Still, if you have to decide on a period in which the voice was best recorded in its best condition then this is the one to choose. Harder to make, very probably, was the decision about repertoire. The whole run of the 1906 recordings is included, all of them deservedly, but 1911 also brought the Werther arias, the Tosca Te Deum scene, some Bellini and Donizetti and, best of all, nine songs with piano accompaniment, and those really are vintage Battistini: material for another issue, in fact.
Meanwhile we have riches enough to be going on with. Of course it is well to be clear from the start that Battistini (''the glory of Italy'', ''king of baritones'' and so forth) had his fair share of faults. By 1906 (when he was 50) the low notes had become so colourless that it is almost comical to hear him, in the solo from Zampa for example, plagued by the repeated low D flats which he can neither avoid nor sing with comfort. He sometimes pushes a high note further than it should go, as at the end of Hamlet's Drinking song and in the supernumerary high G flats of Papa Germont's aria in La traviata. There are some old-fashioned portamentos, Don Giovanni's ''ci sposeremo'' being the first of many; and sometimes he takes a breath defying linguistic sense. But the three supremely needful qualities are there in supremely plentiful supply: beauty of voice, excellence of technique, and an imaginative, living, individual art. He is always called the master of bel canto, and in many ways this is true; but it can be misleading. He was one of the great expressive singers. Hear, for instance, the start of ''O de' verd'
anni miei'' and compare de Luca (Preiser (CD) 89036, 1/92): de Luca preserves the smooth, bel canto line, while Battistini is smooth and emphatic by turns. His style provides for a fascinating variety of expression, and this is the paradoxical thing about him: he was generally regarded as an 'old master' in an old-fashioned school, yet in many ways his art led forward to the modern school of expressiveness, with exponents such as Gobbi and even Fischer-Dieskau.'