Nessun Dorma And Other Favourite Italian Tenor Arias

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Cat No: 8554065

Release Date: 12 January 1999

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 636943406526

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: NESSUN DORMA AND OTHER FAVOURITE ITALIAN TENOR ARIAS

Description
Nessun DormaTwenty Favourite Italian Tenor AriasTenors have had a varied fate in operatic history and have not alwayshad the heroic identities they now generally possess, with fathers and villainssinging in a lower register, heroines as high-flying sopranos, and duennas,mothers, confidantes and nurses confined to mezzo-soprano or even contraltoregisters.The tenor voice enjoyed early favour as opera developed, in the firstyears of the seventeenth century. By the 1640s, though, matters had started tochange. Now the principal heroic r??les were allotted to castrato singers, malesopranos or male altos, while the tenor all too often took character parts,comic servants or even pantomime dame nurses. The fortunes of the voice beganto revive in the eighteenth century, notably with the operas of Handel, whilethe French continued to use their own version of the high tenor, the haute-contre,with its tendency to falsetto in its highest range.>The nineteenth century brought marked changes in society and culture.While Mozart had tailored his arias to particular singers, with music that wasessentially occasional, designed for those very singers on a particularoccasion, later composers wrote more as they wished, providing a continuingrepertoire of operas that might be revived again and again, as they are today.Nevertheless they remained fully aware of the voices for which they wereinitially writing, inspired and influenced by the great singers of their time.Here the tenor voice won gradual pre-eminence, although singers might beclassified according to the type of music in which they specialised, with theheroic Heldentenor for Wagner, lyric tenors for Puccini or dramatictenors for Berlioz.The present collection of favourite tenor arias includes, as it must, apreponderance of Verdi, almost equalled in quantity by Puccini, with anecessary modicum of Mascagni and Leoncavallo and a touch of Giordano andPonchielli, and more than a nod to the earlier composer Donizetti.Gaetano Donizetti had a relatively short career. He was born in Bergamoin 1797, the year of Schubert's birth, and died in the same town in 1848. Hiscareer started in Rome in 1822 with Zoraida di Granata and ended in 1843with the production of Dam Sebastien, roi de Portugal ('Dom Sebastian,King of Portugal') at the Paris Opera. The comic opera L'elisir d'amore wasfirst staged in Milan in 1832 and deals with the love of the simple-mindedNemorino for Adina, which has notable assistance from the home-made aphrodisiacsupplied to him, for a price, by the quack doctor Dulcamara. In Una furtivalagrima ('A furtive tear') Nemorino realises that Adina loves him, seeingin her eyes the tears that she tries to hide.Giuseppe Verdi dominated the second half of the nineteenth century inItalian opera, scoring his first great success with the opera Nabucco atLa Scala, Milan, in 1842. After that began his years in the galley, as he said,writing opera after opera. Rigoletto is the story of a hunchback jester,who helps his ma
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