This recording captures three rising operatic stars in youthful but assured voice. As Almaviva, Giuseppe di Stefano brings a bright voice ready to negotiate Rossini’s intricate fioratura, and also has the vocal acting talents to impersonate the Count’s two disguises. Giulietta Simoniato, who later moved to much heavier roles, here has the agility to sing and to embellish Rosina’s coloratura. And Siepi stuns the Mexico City audience with “La calumnia,” a showstopper that evokes multiple rounds of cheers until the basso encores the piece, indeed adding still more assurance and expression the second time around. Conductor Renato Cellini (later General Director of the New Orleans Opera Association) sets lively tempos and also takes care in supporting the singers; he also nicely showcases the woodwinds in the overture and in the introductions to major arias.Two other roles are less well cast. The Figaro, Enzo Mascherini (a protégé of Tito Ruffo) harks back to a singing mode that relies on funny business and shouted high notes. He is often audibly off the beat in faster passages, and his vocal tone is dry, not blending well with the ensemble. Gerard Pechner, the Bartolo, also mostly relies on comic ad libs. A prewar refugee from Berlin, he was a Met regular in comprimario parts and second-tier Wagner roles (Alberich, Klingsor); critics often commented on his scene-stealing visual and vocal antics as Meistersinger’s Beckmesser. Here he tries his tricks with no sense of Rossini style: “Un dottor” is radically cut, and the pattered section is simply spit out helter-skelter, sans pitch or meter, while Cellini waits until he is done.Most of the performance is in pretty good sound, with vocalists well forward at all times. But the audio source (I’d guess acetate transcription discs) has some bad patches where the sound is subject to wows and distortion. This particularly affects the last section of di Stefano’s otherwise lovely “Ecco ridente,” the Act 2 rainstorm intermezzo, and the following trio “Ah qual colpo.” Still, there is much to appreciate in this souvenir of vocal promise just being discovered.

The young Di Stefano was a wonderful tenor.