Night and Day Mario Lanza is the title of the latest CD release of Lanza’s singing using Digitally Extracted Stereo to enhance the original mono recordings. The technique is a revelation. Lanza’s great voice sounds like it was recorded yesterday. The two-disc set contains 49 selections ranging from opera to popular songs and a lot in between all of which are sung with the beauty and artistry that made Lanza one of the greatest singers of the previous century.
The American tenor’s sad life story has been told here and elsewhere. Born the same year (1921) as another golden-voiced tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano, Lanza should have been singing at the Met as early as 1948 the year of Di Stefano’s Met debut. Lanza would have lasted longer as his technique was better founded than the Italian singer whose voice declined precipitously after age 35. Lanza’s voice was produced without unnecessary vocal strain. Had he lived a normal lifespan I think he would have sung to great effect past his 60th birthday like the other great American tenor Richard Tucker.
But as Faulkner observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In Lanzas’s case, it’s alive on these discs. Who are they for? Everyone! Amazon says the disc will be available on February 7th. The video below gives a full description of the new release’s contents. My thanks to Professor Derek McGovern who wrote the informative liner notes and who supervised the project for sending me a pre-release copy of the discs. Their contents are below.

What a welcome restoration this will be! Milton Cross, whom I was fortunate to know quite well, was in Hollywood for a radio concert when he was introduced to the young Lanza, who invited him to be in the control room while he was making a recording. Mr. Cross said that Lanza’s “live” voice sounding so different from the RCA discs that he (Cross) could scarcely hear the “real” voice. At the time of their release, critic Irving Kolodin was so dismissive of the engineering that had made them “tricked up in a vain effort to make them sound Caruso-like” that the records’ only use was “for tracking down rattles in speakers.” It’s high time that this great tenor’s voice will be heard in all its splendor.