Can ‘Pikovaya Dama’ Get RCA Victor Back on Map? : Music: After years of decline as a classical music label, the firm gambles on its first U.S. operatic recording in 25 years.

RCA Victor--the company that made Enrico Caruso and Jascha Heifetz household names--is making a comeback with a large vanity recording, a project that has huge risks and little profit-making prospects.

RCA’s engineers were scheduled to wrap up the project Tuesday night in Symphony Hall, the company’s first opera recorded in the United States in 25 years, and only its second opera recorded since 1981.

Captured on 24-track tape by a crew of five over a week’s time were the live semi-staged performances of Tchaikovsky’s Gothic opera, “Pikovaya Dama” (“Queen of Spades”). The cast of headliners included the Italian soprano Mirella Freni and Soviet artists led by tenor Vladimir Atlantov and baritones Sergi Leiferkus and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony.

After years of decline, RCA is taking the high--but risky--road of recording large projects, especially recordings of live performances.

But to hedge the bet, RCA is recording all three “Pikovaya Dama” performances--sung in Russian in prestigious Symphony Hall, home of the Boston Symphony--and there will even be a few makeup sessions in the event that live takes are not up to par. State-of-the-art engineering will splice the best performances into one seamless recording and not even Freni’s cancellation Saturday night--due to a cold--was expected to affect the project.

To a certain extent, the “Pikovaya Dama” recording was being made as much for artistic reasons as prestige, with profits--or loss--having little bearing, according to Guenter Hensler, RCA’s president for the past 2 1/2 years.

“We don’t expect to make money on this project,” Hensler said from his office in New York. “But who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky? Certainly money was not a consideration when we decided to do ‘Pikovaya Dama.’ I think this is just a very artistic and beautiful project. It will help us to get our label back on the map.”

Once America’s premiere recording company, RCA was acquired in the mid-’80s by the German health company Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), to complement its other recording companies, Eurodisc and Deutsche Harmoni Mundi. RCA Victor is now the flagship American label.

In the past three years only a few operatic discs have been made in the United States, where orchestra and production costs have been so high compared to Europe that most recording activity has been almost nil for about two decades.

According to Hensler, though, the future is slim for recording projects such as “Pikovaya Dama.”

“It really depends on the project that would come along. But it’s not something that’s so easily planned. And I would see us certainly doing more recordings in Europe than here. But if a unique opportunity like this ‘Pikovaya Dama’ comes along, we would certainly grab it.”