Richard Crooks - 'Una Furtiva Lagrima' from 'L'Elisir d'Amore' (1945 V-Disc)

Richard Crooks sings the famous aria, 'Una furtiva Lagrima' from Donizetti's 'L'Elisir d'Amore', recorded circa 1945. One of the best performances of him I've ever came across.

This recording, as you can see, was released on a V-Disc; a series of vinyl 78rpm records made by private U.S. record companies during the WW2 era by special arrangement between the United States government and record companies. These V-Discs were produced for the use of United States military personnel overseas.

Most of the performers appeared on V-Discs were popular singers and bands of the period, but they occasionally had some decent Classical music selections as well. Most of the recordings, however, was dubbing from the original masters made by record companies, and this one is not an exception, hence the low and high frequencies were somewhat distorted.

Also, since the record was made out of vinyl and played on U.S. Army portable phonographs (one example can be seen here : http://youtu.be/w2d4pXq3shw ) which was far from well-made and literally scraped off the soft grooves of the vinyl. This one also suffers great amount of wear and scratches.

Because of these shortages, this record sounds very poor and I could not make it play without skipping, so I had to go through several steps to make it sound listenable. I hope you'll like it. I also sped up the recording to play at 80rpm, as the dubbing was obviously done on low speed and made Crooks sound like a baritone.


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Category:

Music

Tags:

• Richard
• Crooks
• Una
• Furtiva
• Lagrima
• L'Elisir
• d'Amore
• 1945
• V-Disc
• 78rpm
• Phonograph
• Gramophone

[MrRom92DAW]

great upload!

[ch0okz1]

You have given us a real feast of Richard Crooks today Mark -- thank you, as he is one of my favourite tenors. BTW how are you these days? Haven't heard from you for ages, do write when you have time