Phantom Recordings Of The Opera Restored (But Are They Really Any Good?)

Those century-old gramophone recordings of Caruso, Melba and their contemporaries that were retrieved from the vaults of the Paris Opéra last year have been extracted from their urns, dusted off and digitized – and they can now be heard. (One soloist and teacher at the Opéra avers that those old singers with their old vocal techniques just aren’t up to our modern standards: “Most of them would not get past the quarter-finals in a contest nowadays.”)