Blessed be Pearl! And blessed be Gaisberg, Fred the Great of that name, who had the inspiration and persuaded the authorities at Covent Garden to admit representatives of His Master’s Voice, with their sound engineer and his microphones, to the sacred ‘Grand’ Season to make recordings which might have discredited the whole show. It was a risky undertaking for all concerned, and I daresay the results have never sounded so well as they do in these transfers.Just a couple of points should be cleared first, and then the performances can be discussed on their merits. Strictly speaking, these are not, as claimed, ‘The First Live Recordings’: others had been made earlier in the season, and, long before that, Lionel Mapleson had privately recorded on cylinders from the Metropolitan in New York. That, if you like, is a quibble. Not so the failure to acknowledge the previous publication, on LP, of all the material here with the exception of Siebel’s Flower song in Faust. Reference is made to issue or non-issue on 78s, but the real pioneering work was done in an album, ‘Covent Garden Historical Recordings of Actual Performances’, from EMI in 1979. The company itself may not deserve mention since it appears to have left it to others to preserve on CD this important part of its heritage. But its producer, the late Keith Hardwick, does.The two performances are famous, the first for preserving part of Zenatello’s Otello, the second for Chaliapin’s Méphistophélès. Zenatello is widely regarded (perhaps with Leo Slezak) as being the best Otello in the decades following Tamagno, the great original. Chaliapin was one of the three supreme artists of the operatic stage in the 20th century, and most who heard him would affirm that the stage (rather than the recording studio) was his element. So these are important recordings. The performances of the two singers are so intricately woven of fault and fineness that each deserves an essay to itself (with much to be added also about Hislop’s Faust).But equally remarkable are some more general features. From the tone of much hearsay commentary we get the impression that though performances in those days may have had some star quality about certain individual performances, the musical standard was otherwise poor and the dramatic or expressive elements of opera non-existent. Well, such evidence as these recordings provide suggests it simply was not so. The soloists do not just ‘stand and deliver’ (as the silly phrase has it). The orchestral playing is not lax (often in fact quite remarkably alert). And there is never any question but that, under-rehearsed though they were, these performances were fully committed and fully alive. Hear them!