I don't like ''King Of Belcanto'' which is this record's title, but I do (with some qualifications) like Giuseppe Morino. We have had several remarkable tenors in this late renaissance of practice in the early nineteenth-century style, the most recent being Chris Merritt, Rockwell Blake and Raul Gimenez. Of these, I find that admiration for the technique of the first two (while noting their great success in Italy) does not induce a liking for their voices or an affectionate response to their style; Gimenez, with a warmer and rarer quality of tone, makes more personal appeal, even if he is objectively less brilliant than the others. Morino seems to have what we have wanted all along: that is, the voice of an Italian lyric tenor extended to accommodate the particularly demanding upper range involved in this repertoire and still managing to sound sweet and unpinched in the process.
His first distinction is the mellifluous quality of tone, the second his exceptional success on the high notes, C and above. There are plenty of examples here, with the top C of ''Salut, demeure'' and the C sharp of ''A te, o cara'' as mere preparations for the stratospheric altitudes of Il pirata and Semiramide. It was in this latter opera that Morino scored his first big success in Italy, at the Valle d'Itria Festival of 1986, and the restoration of ''Ah, dov'e il cimento'' in Act 1, formidably difficult and usually omitted, was one of its special features. He certainly convinced the most experienced Italian critics, both in this and in the 1988 revival of Donizetti's Maria di Rohan, that here was a tenor well grounded in the history of the vocal art and well able to give an authentic representation of the sound and probably the style of the original singers. Not that his style is particularly decorative or what modern taste might regard as excessively self-indulgent: his ''Una furtiva lagrima'', for instance, is much 'straighter' than the Caruso of 1904, and though he ends the Pecheurs de perles aria with the discredited high addition he does it unostentatiously and makes as beautiful an effect as I have heard. Like so many of his countrymen he aspirates his runs far too often (intolerable, to my mind, in the Semiramide), and another fault is that his 'e' sounds (as in ''vedo'') tend to go backwards into the throat.
Recorded sound is acceptable, and though the orchestra scarcely distinguish themselves they do at least keep the accompaniment down to a murmur so that the soft singing can be a true pianissimo. Presentation is maddeningly inadequate, the writer of the notes on ''The King Of Belcanto'' seeming to share the assumptions of one of Oscar Wilde's characters who, as I remember it, says something like ''Pray do not degrade me by requiring that I should supply you with useful information''.'