English soothsayer Norman Lebrecht predicted that the year 2004 would spell the death of classical recording. How uncanny, how eerie the feeling when I opened the door of my office only to see a large stack of envelopes containing … oh, horror! … new classical CDs. They were ghoulishly similar in appearance, weight, and sound to the ones that came before the great Lebrechtian devastation. O unspeakable apparition! O unaccountable event! Playing now is a recital of Gounod and Massenet arias on Virgin Classics with the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón. Unless someone has run a fiendish digital simulation in the studio, this is a major, beautiful, passionate, intelligent voice. Somehow I overlooked Villazón’s Italian recital from last year; I’ll have to track it down. The new disc is in stores January 25th.