The praises of Cortis were sung in these columns in October 1991 when a collection of his best recordings was issued on Preiser. The opportunity for an encore is eagerly seized for he is quite simply one of the best tenors on record, and one whose name is not half so well known as it should be. His voice was rich like a good Rioja; its flavour was equally distinctive. He used his natural resources with a lively, imaginative art, never (on the records of his maturity) exaggerating the emotion or falsifying in any other way. His career flourished in Chicago during the 1920s and then suffered from the economic depression, the Second World War (which confined him largely to his native Spain) and increasing ill health. I wonder if it would trespass excessively on the Editor's tolerance if I were to mention that the November 1993 issue of Opera Now contains an article on him, by myself, in the ''Singers of the Century'' series.
The Nimbus recital shares 14 of its tracks with the Preiser disc, which also contains three not on Nimbus but lacks nine which are. Those nine include the magnificent two from La cena delle beffe, the one in a vein of deliciously pained, sweet lyricism, the other a masterpiece of bitter characterization. There is also that remarkable record which condenses most of Rodolfo's solo part in Act 3 of La boheme into something less than four minutes (and hear, for instance, how Cortis softens on the elision of ''Ah, non lo son'' with ''Invan, invan nascondo''). The zarzuelas (items from L'alegria del batallon, Dona Francisquita and Una vieja) find him in liquid voice, idiomatic in style, scrupulous in legato. Then, among his rarest records, are two of his own songs, one of them ascribed Mojica-Cortis. Did his fellow Chicago tenor Jose Mojica supply the words, I wonder, or did they put their heads together and each write a bit of both?
The notes are no help here, nor indeed are they on the contents of any of the Spanish items bar one. The scores of such things are admittedly difficult to obtain, but surely somebody with a smattering of Spanish could have been found to provide at least something for the listener to go on. In a song with a title such as The obstacle we rather want to know what the 'obstacle' is. As to the quality of the transfers, Nimbus's methods are well known by now, and this is a good representative issue in all respects, including the excellence of the original copies.'