The first time Ermonela Jaho and Michael Spyres worked together was a concert performance of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell at La Monnaie in March 2014. Spyres was a late jump-in to sing the treacherously difficult tenor role of Arnold, the love interest for Jaho’s Mathilde. ‘He came directly from the airport straight into rehearsals,’ recalls Jaho. ‘He didn’t complain, even though he was jetlagged. The tenor role is huge, and he nailed every single note. I thought, is he even human?’

‘Who is this insane guy?’ quips Spyres. ‘The night before, I’d had Le villi in Paris,’ continues Jaho. ‘Singing Puccini and singing Rossini are very different, so I was planning on telling them that I was tired, I was maybe going to mark a little… but when I heard him singing, I didn’t have the courage!’

Ten years on, the pair are reunited at All Saints’ Church, East Finchley, to record Donizetti songs with Carlo Rizzi as part of a typically ambitious Opera Rara (OR) project involving multiple singers. Jaho and Spyres were both appointed Opera Rara Artist Ambassadors in 2022 and have a long association with the company.

Nobody who was in the Royal Festival Hall for the concert performance of Donizetti’s Les Martyrs in 2014 will forget Spyres pinging out a high E natural in Polyeucte’s cabaletta ‘Oui, j’irai dans leurs temples!’ This was the American tenor’s first professional association with Opera Rara, but it had already been pretty influential on his early career. ‘Opera Rara was the label that allowed me to think outside the norm,’ Spyres relates. ‘When I was trying to become a tenor, I didn’t have any role models because I am basically a bass-tenor – I would wake up and sing Sarastro in the morning and then go to choir rehearsals where I had to jump between tenor, baritone and bass. When I was working on my own voice, trying to turn it into a tenor, the recordings I came across were Opera Rara CDs from the 1980s with Bruce Ford, Chris Merritt and Rockwell Blake that just blew my mind! Oh, I thought, you can still have that timbre and yet have those high notes?

‘I grew up listening to all these recordings and when I auditioned for programmes at all the New England conservatories, I was singing Boieldieu and Auber while people were asking, “Where’s your Puccini and your Verdi?” When I told them that I’m 21 and shouldn’t be singing Puccini and Verdi yet, they replied, “Well you’ll never sing here in the States”, so I asked, “Well, where can I make a career?” and they said, “Go to Europe”. So I did!’

‘Les Martyrs with Sir Mark Elder was the first thing I was hired for by OR, which began my whole love for Donizetti. I’d sung Lucia di Lammermoor and L’elisir d’amore before and I wasn’t sure they were for me – not that deep – but with Les Martyrs I realised I was completely wrong.’ He went on to record Le Duc d’Albe and included four Donizetti arias on his solo Opera Rara album, L’Espoir.

Like Spyres, Jaho also began working with Opera Rara in 2014, with a performance and studio recording of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s rarity Zazà, which she describes as ‘a great discovery. We always think of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci but to record an unknown opera was a great challenge.’ She went on to record Puccini’s Le Willis (the original one-act version of Le villi) and a debut recital album, Anima Rara, which focused on roles championed by Rosina Storchio, the first Madama Butterfly.

Ermonela Jaho and Carlo Rizzi performing at the Donizetti & Friends recital at Wigmore Hall (Russel Duncan)

She is full of admiration for the label. ‘It’s run by love. As artists, you need to feel loved and appreciated to give your best and Opera Rara does this.’

‘It’s nurturing,’ Spyres interjects. ‘Exactly,’ Jaho replies. ‘And you don’t feel judged. You become a better singer and a better human being. To do that in harmony is something very difficult to do in opera houses today.’ Because of the time constraints in staging opera with minuscule rehearsals? Jaho nods.

It is not unusual to step into a revival and perform on just one or two rehearsals. ‘I remember my first Zauberflöte in Berlin,’ Spyres relates. ‘I met the conductor when I stepped on to the stage for the performance!

‘What I love about Opera Rara is that it’s unearthing pieces nobody has ever heard, not just for the public but for ourselves. It takes a lot of work to do what they’re doing. You have this torch and you’re walking through the crypt, discovering these missing links in the story. Also, you don’t have to worry about putting it on stage. You can concentrate on the pure artform of it. I would love to unearth stuff, record it and – when everybody knows the piece – then you can put it on stage. That would bring about a revolution in the
opera world.’

Occasionally some of those Opera Rara discoveries do make it to the stage. I tell them about seeing Les Martyrs at Theater an der Wien last season and we ponder how influential OR’s recording had been on its being programmed.

Opera Rara’s projects are certainly not cheap to produce. They are usually studio recordings allied to concert performances, while the CDs are always stylishly presented, with scholarly booklet notes and full texts and translations. As chief executive Henry Little tells me, ‘We invest a huge amount of care and time. There are many ways to do this much less expensively, but you compromise
on quality.’

The Donizetti Song Project is suitably ambitious, recording his entire corpus of nearly 200 songs, many of which have rarely been heard before, involving much detective work by repertoire consultant Roger Parker. The first volumes recorded – featuring Spyres’ sparring tenor partner Lawrence Brownlee and baritone Nicola Alaimo – were issued in October. In addition to Jaho’s disc of Italian songs, recorded in the days before our interview, she will return for a recital of French songs. Future issues include discs by Rosa Feola and Marie-Nicole Lemieux.

Spyres’ disc is an all-French recital. I spend the day watching him lay down half a dozen tracks, one of which features a harp obbligato, whose coda proves tricky to synchronise perfectly with Carlo Rizzi on the piano. Rizzi is staggered by the variety as he reaches the project’s halfway mark. The songs I hear that afternoon, with perhaps one exception, are full of invention and some remarkable harmonies. Parker is on hand for score consultation, as is a language coach, all presided over by eagle-eared producer Jeremy Hayes.

Jaho, who presented a selection of these songs in a lunchtime Wigmore Hall recital a fortnight later, notes a definite development in Donizetti’s style. ‘Roger discovered some of these songs in France and Austria. Their styles are so different and harmonically difficult. Even vocally, they make great demands.’ Earlier that week, she had recorded Il pescatore, a song that lasts over eight minutes.

Spyres can top that. La dernière nuit d’un novice, at around 12 minutes, is ‘the longest Lied I’ve ever seen – like an operatic scena. You see how harmonically daring Donizetti was and it was very difficult switching between these different voices. It’s almost like a scene from La damnation de Faust. Did Berlioz ever hear these songs? They were written before Faust! At this time, only Schubert and Loewe were writing songs like this. Some of them feel really personal, almost as if he was writing for himself.’ Next March, Spyres presents some of them in a Cadogan Hall recital shared with Lemieux.

In an era where there are very few studio recordings being made of the standard operatic repertoire – although both Jaho and Spyres featured in Warner’s lavishly cast Turandot – companies like Opera Rara and Palazzetto Bru Zane are excavating and documenting a huge number of rarities. OR’s catalogue now extends to 65 complete operas. Are there any neglected works that Spyres and Jaho have their eyes on?

‘For me, Auber’s La muette de portici!’ exclaims Spyres. ‘I did it once on stage. It’s considered the first French grand opera, written a year before Guillaume Tell, which kind of solidified the genre. Auber had this incredible 60-year career as a composer and went from being like a proto-Haydn to greeting the French grand revolution. La muette is truly a masterpiece. The character I played was the historical figure of Masaniello who, to this day, is celebrated every year in Napoli, where he was trying to overthrow the Spanish conquerors. He was made king for about three days but was poisoned and martyred to quell the revolution. The mute role of his sister, Fenella, is danced by a ballerina and there’s this 10-minute scene between us, with her doing interpretive dance. It’s so revolutionary, but nobody knows it.’

Spyres would also love a crack as a baritone at the original version of Verdi’s Macbeth. Given that Opera Rara has just taped the original Simon Boccanegra, perhaps it’s on the cards.

For Jaho, it’s the world of verismo that she adores. ‘You have to be so theatrical; every word, every breath has meaning. It’s hard because if you really believe in a role, it becomes part of you. With something like Suor Angelica, I still haven’t found the key to emotionally detach myself from it. Three or four weeks ago I sang it in Munich and in the last performance it was like I was dying on stage. When you go to that kind of place, that dimension, it’s so emotional that it’s like a drug. But this is my passion. I listen to Michael talking and I’m so fascinated because it’s another world.

‘Giordano’s Siberia is beautiful, which I discovered when I recorded Anima Rara. Another is Lodoletta by Mascagni, where this last scena, which lasts a dozen minutes, is a true masterpiece. I would be curious to know the whole opera. Or even Mascagni’s Iris, which came shortly before Butterfly.’

There is more verismo on the OR horizon. In December 2025, Jaho is set to record the role of Magda in Puccini’s La rondine, a choice that may cause a few eyebrows to be raised. Just how ‘rare’ is Rondine? Being Opera Rara, there is, of course,
a twist.

In April 2024, Riccardo Chailly conducted Ditlev Rindom’s new critical edition of the original version at La Scala, what Little describes as a ‘prequel’. Puccini was never entirely satisfied with the published version, which premiered in Monte-Carlo in March 1917, and worked on two further versions, each with a different ending.

In Version 2, Prunier is a baritone (rather than a tenor) and is the deciding factor in Magda’s decision to leave her lover, Ruggero. In Version 3, Magda’s ‘protector’, Rambaldo, pitches up at the French Riviera to beg Magda to return to him. It ends with Ruggero’s discovery of who Magda really is, and he rejects her as a prostitute. Neither version was ever performed during Puccini’s lifetime. Although an orchestration of the third version was made by Puccini’s student Lorenzo Ferrero, it is, by all accounts, ‘terrible’ [Henry Little] so Opera Rara’s recording of this ‘final version’ will be of a new orchestration. Opera Rara will also give a concert performance at the Barbican on 5 December 2025. ‘What’s the opera like?’ asks Spyres. ‘I only know two arias from it.’

‘It’s a love story,’ Jaho explains. ‘Magda has to give up her love. It’s a drama, even if people don’t think so because nobody dies at the end. There’s a generosity to it which can feel a bit old school today, but it’s wonderful.’

Spyres beams. ‘I love the fact that our voices are magnified with Opera Rara, simply because we are both such champions of opera in the broadest sense, being able to tell these stories to the public and make them realise that opera is not an elitist form. We get to be the keepers of the flame.’ Long may those flames burn. ON

Volume 3 of Opera Rara’s Donizetti Songs recording cycle with Michael Spyres and Carlo Rizzi will be released in February. Volume 5 and 6 with Ermonela Jaho and Rizzi will be released this autumn

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Opera Now. Never miss an issue – subscribe today