Jonas Kaufmann and Ludovic Tézier recorded nine tenor-baritone duets, released on a Sony Classics disc in June 2022. Insieme translates from Italian as together. The two singers are friends who have often performed together hence the title. The master of the tenor-baritone duet was Verdi. Accordingly, seven of the selections are by him. The CD starts with the…
Verdi’s last opera Falstaff, written when he was almost 80, is opera’s greatest sport. It is unlike anything else by the composer or by anyone else, for that matter. Verdi had written all his previous with the expectation of pleasing his audiences while observing the highest artistic standards. But near the end of his life,…
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is now a standard in the operatic repertory. In 1950 a complete performance of the opera was hard to find. The best known songs from the work were often done as recital pieces or on recordings. The Met didn’t mount its first production of the opera until 1985. In 1950 two…
Matteo Manuguerra (1924-1998) was born in Tunis to Italian parents. His family moved to Buenos Aires where he received his initial vocal training. Rare among great singers was his extremely late start. He didn’t begin studying voice until he was 35. He first was a tenor, but after moving to France in 1961 he returned…
Mattia Battistini (1856-1928) was born to an upper middle class Roman family. He dropped out of university studies (what he was studying is uncertain) to take singing lessons with Venceslao Persichini at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in 1877. By the end of the following year he had made such progress that he debuted as…
Giuseppe Bellantoni (1880-1946) was another outstanding Italian baritone whom opera seems to have forgotten. Born in Messina, Sicily he went to Rome in his early 20s to study under the legendary baritone Antonio Cotogni (1831-1918). Alas, Cortogni’s career preceded the recording era. Everyone including Verdi and Toscanini thought him the prince of baritones. When his…
Domenico Viglione Borghese (1877-1957) was an Italian baritone who was active at a time when there was an abundance of first rate Italian baritones. This unusual confluence of fine singers explains why Viglione Borghese is virtually forgotten today. Born the same year as Tita Ruffo, his path to the top of the operatic world was…
I’m using the same criterion to define a Met house baritone as I did for the company’s tenors; ie, more than 500 performances in leading roles. This rule yields 11 baritones over the life of the Met – almost twice as many as for the tenors. They’re presented below by the number of shows they…
The second act of Rigoletto ends with perhaps the most furious music in all opera. The hunchback jester’s daughter, Gilda, has just been raped by the Duke whom she had fallen in love with thinking he was a poor student until reality intruded with awful suddenness. And worse, she still loves him. The Duke having…
Dmitri Hvorostovsky did not record the Verdi baritone’s summa, Rigoletto, until 2016 – a year after he was diagnosed with brain cancer. This recording was released by Delos near the end of last year shortly before the singer’s death. Rigoletto was not at the core of the great baritone’s repertoire. Of his 182 performances at…