Deutsche Grammophon has signed another impressive young artist to its roster – the French tenor Benjamin Bernheim. The first fruits of the 33-year-old lyric tenor’s deal with the Yellow Label will appear this autumn: joined by the Prague Philharmonia and Emmanuel Vuillaume, he has recorded an album of French, Italian and Russian opera arias (Gounod, Massenet, Donizetti, Puccini, Verdi and Tchaikovsky). 

Announcing the signing, DG’s President Clemens Trautmann commented that ‘Benjamin owns much more than a sublime voice. He is always searching for those vital elements that lie beneath the music’s surface, demonstrating a combination of intuition and empathy as well as technical mastery. We’re determined to introduce this remarkable young star to a large new audience, and show why he’s in such high demand at the world’s leading opera companies.’

Roles in opera DVDs have already earned positive note in Gramophone – he was described as ‘an excellent Cassio’ in a DVD of Otello conducted by Christian Thielemann in 2017, while in 2016 he was also praised for his performance of Tebaldo in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi. He also in fact made an earlier DG appearance, in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, on a recording from the Salzburg Festival starring Anna Netrebko.