Everyone who attended ENO in the 60s/70s seems to have strong memories of this pair.

I've only heard Remedios in the Goodall Ring - as some may know, I have a deep aversion to translated opera, so find it very difficult to listen to this set and the clod-hopping Andrew Porter (mis)translation that it commemorates.  But from what I can make out, Remedios had the goods. Which leads me to ask: given that the 70s (when A.R. was at his acknowledged peak) was only marginally more blessed with hedentenors than our own, why didn't he have an international career, owning the part of Siegfried in Europe and America and making major recordings to boot?

The same goes for Hunter, even though she did make at least one international recording (Janowski's excellent 1974 version of Weber's 'Euryanthe').  I'd have thought Hunter had even more going for her, in terms of her distinctive size and bubbly (though not Lesley Garrettish) personality.

Yet, as far as I know, they each made only one solitary appearance at the Met. 

So...why did these big British opera stars never become big international stars? And don't tell me it was their names that held them back (Remedios need not have worried on that account, anyway.) 

You may be right about the languages, Ron. But being a dud in every language but his own never held the likes of Corelli back, did it?

And, yes, I know of other singers who cannot replicate in the studio the experience they deliver on stage (Dolores Zajick springs to mind here, for some reason).

And they may well indeed have been happy where they were.....in the case of Remedios, being on stage at the Wells must have been far preferable to working on the Liverpool docks.

But I do still find it strange that the world didn't beat a path to their doors....

That Trovatore Leonora was amazing; it's a great pity it was never broadcast, let alone recorded.

I think it's important to remember that these singers were in their prime thirty years or so ago, and the world was a very different place then, with far fewer singers jetting round the world: nowadays they'd no doubt have had high profile agents angling for them. But it's hard to get across just how ordinary they were, Alberto in particular: he was really more at home with the stage crew than most of his fellow singers, a world away from what most people might assume a star tenor to be. I think it's fair to say that stage-craft didn't come all that naturally to him: he needed a lot of coaching. The fact that there were problems with learning German really did limit the productions that he could do abroad, and I'm not convinced that many opera houses would have been able to spare the time needed to slot him into a role, particularly on the continent where new singers may go into a production after just a couple of days rehearsing alone with a production team: the Wells was just the right place at the right time for him, with the staff who could coach and coax the performances out of him over a much longer period: but for them, I doubt whether the undoubtedly glorious voice would ever have been heard in such roles at all.

Yes indeed: Ramon's voice was rather smaller than Alberto's, and more suited to light opera and operetta; indeed he spent a year in Phantom of the Opera in the West End in the eighties, and was sometimes to be heard on Radio 2's FNIMN. Alberto jovial? That's putting it mildly: a terrible corpser, and I've already mentioned the stream of Scouse consciousness from the supposedly deceased Siegfried as we carried him around the stage during the funeral march....

And your humble servant was First Slave with all the dialogue in the difficult scene for Monostatos's servants (which is normally cut). And operated the dragon at the beginning, as well as being the front end of the rhino in Tamino's first aria. That was the famous run where not only did one of the Movement Group girls inside an animal costume become completely lost and end up precariously perched on one of the narrow slatted runners which ran out over the sides of the pit, but also where one of the Tamini (the show was double-cast) got lost in the stack of scenery for the concurrent productions at the rear of the stage and compounded the disaster by making a very inapposite ad-lib: I don't think we ever saw him again thereafter. Double conducted, too, Mackerras led some performances before moving on to rehearse From the House of the Dead .

There was a Hunter Trovatore in the same season, though the tenor was Tom Swift. (Oh the terrors of having to arm him during "De quella pira".... Greaves, breast-plate, arm pieces: they all had to go on in a specific order, and the timing was horrendously tight, and not helped by his rather semaphoric style of singing. Christian du Plessis and Katherine Pring as the other leads. The great mishap in this one was that the chorus were working to rule, and refusing to perform extra activities, which in this case included anvil bashing. The two chorus masters, Jim Holmes, and someone I can see, but whose name I forget, were pressed into service; one tall and thin, the other short and stout, they were costumed in true Art of Coarse Acting style and pushed on stage, where, not just because of the ridiculous costumes, they stood out like sore thumbs. Added to which, for the first performance at least, one of them seemed to have difficulty in establishing the beat...

Don't know the name at all, Rei, so he must have been after my time. I've done a couple of Sondheim Galas with Jim since then, so I'm well aware of his conducting capablities. I just wish I could remember the other guy's name: Ken someone, I think. 

   Yes, it is rather sad that Rita Hunter's recording legacy is so brief.  Discounting the memorable Goodall Ring cycle recording, including the 2 disc Gotterdammerung highlights with Mackerras/LPO, my shelves also have  a 2 LP set of a recital she gave at Wyndhams Theatre with Hazel Vivienne as accompanist and a single LP compilation The English National Opera (1975) in which she sings Casta Diva from Norma - a striking jacket portrait of her Norma is also included on the cover of her biography 'Wait Till The Sun Shines, Nellie' (1986).

Coli devotees were also delighted that the ENO album also featured Alberto Remedios ('Una furtiva lagrima'); Norman Bailey, Denis Dowling, Neil Howlett, Keith Erwen, Sarah Walker, Margaret Haggart, Christian Du Plessis, Eric Shilling, Ann Hood, Terry Jenkins, Alan Opie, Josephine Barstow, Clifford Grant, Sandra Dugdale John Brecknock, Ava June, Lois McDonall, Margaret Curphey and Geoffrey Chard - all stalwarts of the 1970s on this vinyl.   The black and white cover, includes the Coli interior from the ceiling to the proscenium arch and is a work of art in itself.     I treasure this recording alongside an off-air video of "Farewell George" a tribute to the departing George Harewood.

Unforgettable, too, at The Coli was the Saturday evening performance of' Idomeneo' when Lucia Popp sang Ilia for an indisposed Lois McDonall.  Rita Hunter sang Elettra and adroitly directed Popp, by placement gestures, in their scenes together.   Lord Harewood told us that Lucia Popp literally arrived at the last minute and sang her role in Italian.   The resulting frisson added to the excitement.

I've just been reading Michael Langdon's 'Notes from a Low Singer' (1982) and he writes warmly about his early encounters with Reggie Goodall.  

"I seemed to work with Reginald Goodall much less during my early days as a chorister and principal than I did with the others, and it was only later, when I began to work on the Wagner roles with him in his studio high up in the Royal Opera House (christened, inevitably, Valhalla) that I got to know him well.     Quite apart from benefitting from his tremendous knowledge of, and feeling for, the music of Wagner, I enjoyed many laughs over operatic life in general.   He, too, possesses a keen sense of the ridiculous and the fact that he insisted on speaking German for 90% of the time somehow made his comments on the inhabitants  of the Opera House even funnier.   He was always a very shy, private person."