It is a poor response to a singer, or indeed to an artist of any sort, to talk about him or her as 'a case'. But one may be tempted to do that for a moment with poor Jozsef Reti: 'poor' because he died at the too early age of 48 in 1973 and, though honoured in his native Hungary, has not been accorded the international recognition that appears to have been his due. Alan Blyth had admired his recordings at the time of their original issue, and I (who had not heard them before 1985) enjoyed enormously a recital of Mozart arias collected a few years ago on a Hungaroton Compact Disc HCD12891 (discussed briefly in ''Quarterly Retrospect'' April 1988). The impression is strengthened by this present record, but so is curiosity about his 'case'. Why was such a good singer not better known? The Mozart recital was particularly welcome for the very reason that Reti was so unlike the widely received sound-picture of a Mozart tenor. Purchasers of the record under review might care to experiment, by first hearing the Zauberflote aria (''Wie stark ist nicht dein Zauberton'') internally; that is, just mentally singing the melody over and noting what kind of voice is 'heard' in association with it. If I do this, I 'hear' a rather bloodless sound, thin, with a slightly whining mixture of head-voice and a somewhat lumpy, uneven style of production. Reti is quite the opposite: the voice has body, the timbre is manly, the emission of tone perfectly steady. It is the same with his Bach. The aria ''Erwage'' has particularly unpleasing aural associations when I listen internally, but here Reti sings with a forthright, firm voice which provides not merely spiritual satisfaction but gives genuine pleasure to the sense of hearing.
So what is the mystery? It may be as Ivan Kertesz suggested in his sleeve-note for the earlier record, that Reti was short and stocky and did not look like love's young dream on stage. Perhaps the lack of interpretative interest provides the answer: the present record strengthens that impression too. Another possibility is suggested by the contrast between what we hear on the records and the biographical facts of his repertoire: it sounds like a big voice, yet he was best known in light roles of Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti. Perhaps the breadth of the voice was of a soft-grained material, not very penetrative. Even so, there is no doubt that he was a remarkable singer: hear, for instance, the fluency and evenness of his work in the Vivaldi arias, or the lovely unaccompanied opening of Liszt's Christmas song. Together with the Mozart recital, this record does, as Gyorgy Uhrman says in his informative essay, bring Reti ''a somewhat belated reward'' on the international scene. Perhaps there is more to come or do we have to conclude that the spectacular high notes, so tantalizingly described, are now lost for ever?'