One thinks one knows: one thinks one remembers. I thought, for instance, that I'd remembered the NAbucco recording and would flinch repeatedly in the aria, continuously in the cabaletta, recovering in time to enjoy the Butterfly and Boheme. Wrong. The opening of Abigail's solo finds Scotto singing most beautifully, the fioriture sometimes exquisitely graceful, the melody sensitively shaped and felt with steadily increasing depth. Here and there a high note threatens trouble but somehow avoids inflicting it until the very last bars of the hectic cabaletta where the tone is raw and the firmness lost. So that survives, as an excerpted passage, remarkably well, as I think the final aria ( ''Su me, momente'') would have done, perhaps, even more movingly, had it been selected too. But the Butterfly does not 'come apart' half so well. Even in context, Barbirolli's long-drawn-out treatment of the ''Vogliatemi bene'' section of the Love duet cloys, the violin oversweet, the pulse too slack. In isolation from all that has gone before, it is simply loved to death, and not all Scotto's affecting characterization and Bergonzi's stylistic purity can keep it alive.
The Boheme excerpts are similarly overloaded with care and lingering attention, and in these Scotto's voice is appreciably older and less under control. The arias Liu arias from Turandot, back in 1965, deserve their place, and the Pagliacci recording, though from later years, provides a reminder of the special touch Scotto could bring when one is least expecting it. Not the most consistently enjoyable anthology, then, but certainly an instructive one.
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