Giuseppe Verdi

Bellissimo Italian Opera offers a selection of duets and arias from Rossini’s Demetrio e Polibio, Donizetti’s Pia de’ Tolomei, Bellini’s Capuleti e Montecchi, Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur and Verdi’s Attila and Ernani.

Features some of the finest singers including Sara Mingardo, Patrizia Ciofi, Marcelo Alvarez and Dimitra Theodossiou.

This live performance was recorded at the Opéra Royal de Wallonie, Liège in April of this year. The production received excellent reviews; “Armiliato’s brilliant Otello…Dessì’s superb Desdemona” La Libre Belgique.

Huberte Vecray was born in 1923 and her exceptional voice was noticed when she was very young. She entered the Conservatoire at Verviers just before World War II. She made her debut at La Monnaie in 1946. She became a great exponent of contemporary repertoire due to her great musicianship and memory. Here she performs arias by Grétry, Beethoven, Verdi, Cilea, Puccini, Jongen and de Boek.

Artistic risks facing a leading company like the Vienna State Opera are new productions of the core repertory. By 1971, when a new production of Verdi’s 'La Traviata' was staged under the musical direction of Josef Krips, the house could already look back on more than 200 performances of the work since the end of the Second World War. Krips himself had already conducted the opera, including a performance in the company’s temporary home at the Theater an der Wien, but none of the three principals had previously appeared in their roles in Vienna. For the protagonist, Ileana Cotrubas, the first night also marked a huge step forward on the road to an international career. Few young sopranos – especially in a performance captured live on the radio – have been as successful in achieving so convincing and touching a balance between the vocal agility needed in the opening act and the lyricism and expressive depth of the following acts of the opera. During the years that followed, Violetta became a role that Ileana Cotrubas was often invited to sing in Vienna and with which she was closely associated not only there but elsewhere too, including appearances at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Both in New York and in Vienna it was Cornell MacNeil who as Giorgio Germont had the task of persuading her to renounce her love of Alfredo, which he did with his powerful Heldenbariton voice – it was not entirely unexpected when only a year later he appeared in Vienna as Wagner’s 'Flying Dutchman'. Alfredo himself was sung by Nicolai Gedda, who found in the part a particularly congenial Italian role to set alongside so many others in a repertory of almost unimaginable breadth. His phrasing was wonderfully simple and yet precisely adapted to his partners’ needs. Not for a moment did he force his voice and yet the top C at the end of his second-act aria could not have been more perfectly focused. Add to this the clear dramatic accents that he brought to the role, and no one in the audience could have wished for a better performance of the figure of the young lover. The rest of the ensemble, which included a young Edita Gruberova as Flora Bervoix, was admirably attuned to the flexible nature of Krips’s Italianate style of conducting. If only all the classics of the repertory could always be presented on this same high level…

The Italian Salvatore Licitra, who tragically died on September 5th 2011 after a motorbike accident, was one of the leading tenors of his generation in the highly sought-after dramatic Italian repertoire. A frequent guest at major opera and concert stages in Europe, the United States and the Far East, he was particularly devoted to Verdi repertoire.

As a tribute to this exceptionally gifted artist we are releasing a selection of his best arias and songs taken from operas from the dramatic Italian oeuvre. Operas by Giuseppi Verdi and Giacomo Puccini feature heavily in the track-listing with each disc opening with a show-stopping famous tenor aria; Nessun Dorma and Celeste Aida respectively.

The 2-CD set ends with five previously unreleased tracks - all well-loved Italian songs recorded with Marco Armiliato and The Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.

Following on from Dreamticket to Andrea Chenier (PR21001), this intriguing series continues with La Traviata. The compilation allows the listener to compare several singers and different interpretations in each role and in one and the same aria.