If Callas sounds as though recorded in a box, Sutherland seems to be in church. In fact it's London's Kingsway Hall, but its reverberance wraps this essentially open-air opera is such a warm embrace that the spaciousness has a curiously stifling effect. Then again, for additional clarity you would expect to go to the more modern recording, and indeed the orchestral texture certainly stands out in sharper differentiation. Yet turning backwards and forwards from the Sutherland recording to the Callas (Votto/EMI) is like changing seats in the opera house: up in the gallery for Sutherland, front stalls for Callas. The vivid definition of the 1957 EMI recording in effect hands you the opera glasses, and with this additional sense of immediacy you concentrate more readily on what you're hearing.
And my goodness, in this opera you need to. Its melodies have sufficient grace and charm to justify its place in the repertory, and twice (in the ensemble ''D'un pensiero'' and the aria ''Ah, non credea mirarti'') the emotion is deeply rooted; but the absence of harmonic, contrapuntal or rhythmic interest brings many passages in the score to a state of musical somnambulism to which one is unlikely to be reconciled by any special pleading about dramatic aptness. In these circumstances, it is a great advantage to have as Amina, whether awake or asleep, a singer who possesses the bright, clean edge of a Tetrazzini or Dal Monte, and/or the strong personality of a Callas. As recorded here, Sutherland is not fully satisfactory on any count, though in saying that one must add that it is with unsatisfactoriness of a great singer, not the dullness of mediocrity.
In certain respects she has improved on her 1962 Decca LP version which, though her voice was at its most beautiful and her virtuosity as its most dazzling, came in for some severe criticism at the time of its release. She now makes more of the recitatives and the consonants. But the recording process, which had never flattered her, has become positively unkind, highlighting a beat in the voice and revealing a deterioration of the glorious upper register which at that time (c. 1980) was scarcely detectable 'in the flesh'. Always the voice remains tonally pure and well-rounded; the trills are always exact, the runs are fluent and precise. But the cantilena of ''Come per me sereno'' and ''Ah, non credea mirarti'' is loosely drawn, and the bravura of ''Sovra il sen'' and ''Ah, non giunge'' lacks the sparkle of keener-tempered tone. On the whole, I would rather hear her in the earlier recording and, better than that, would go back to the 1960 CDs of the ''The Art Of The Prima Donna'' (Decca CD 414 450-2DH2, 5/86) for the Act 1 arias included there.
Pavarotti's contribution is too variable for grateful acknowledgment: flexible and sympathetic in ''Prendi, l'anel ti dono'', he makes a bovine beginning to ''Son geloso'' and constricts his high notes so that we get the best of neither world. Ghiaurov's unspreading tone and easy authority give an aristocratic bearing to his Count, and the aria ''Vi ravviso'' is affectionate if not quite charming. The secondary parts are well taken and Bonynge is good at bringing out such liveliness as the score possesses. Some passages cut in the Callas version are restored, an advantage offset by the abruptly ended finale.'