Gramophone Voice & Ensemble Award 2024: ‘The Great Puccini’

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Jonathan Tetelman shines in Puccini opera excerpts

No tricky ‘second album syndrome’ here. Jonathan Tetelman’s second solo album for DG focuses on Puccini – an apt choice for this centenary year, but then this composer fits the Chilean-American tenor like a glove.

In London, audiences may have caught his Rodolfo in Jonathan Miller’s production of La bohème for English National Opera, while his gripping Cavaradossi at the Theater an der Wien (now available on DVD) and his caddish Pinkerton at the Metropolitan Opera (beamed into cinemas worldwide) have confirmed his reputation as the young Puccini tenor of our day.

It’s a voice that’s bright and golden, immediately recognisable, coloured by a warm vibrato and with a ringing top for those Puccini money notes. And they ring out gloriously in familiar favourites such as ‘Nessun dorma’, but there’s poetry too in exquisite accounts of ‘Che gelida manina’ and ‘E lucevan le stelle’. Hat tip to him for including an aria from the composer’s early Le villi.

But this is not just an album of arias. As on his debut recital, there are duets – with Vida Miknevičiūtė in a hefty scene from Il tabarro, with Federica Lombardi in ‘O soave fanciulla’ – plus a trio from Madama Butterfly and the Act 3 quartet from La bohème. Carlo Rizzi is just the sort of conductor who revels in this repertoire and he draws vibrant playing from the PKF Prague Philharmonia.

I closed my original review by expressing a wish that ‘DG affords Tetelman a full Puccini opera recording soon, please’. Happily, I gather Tosca is on the way. Mark Pullinger

The Recording

‘The Great Puccini’

Jonathan Tetelman ten Federica Lombardi, Marina Monzó, Vida Miknevičiūtė sops Rihab Chaieb mez Theodore Platt bar Önay Köse bass PKF Prague Philharmonia / Carlo Rizzi DG (A/23)

Producer Matthias Erb Engineer Filip Beneš

Read the review | Buy or stream on Presto Music