With this special (and specialized) recital following on so soon after his Opera in English record (Chandos, 4/98), Bruce Ford is receiving well-deserved opportunities and attention. Here his skill in florid work commands unqualified admiration, for he achieves the kind of fluency which until comparatively recent times was thought to be a thing of the past among tenors, and he does so without tricks or distortions, maintaining the unity of his voice throughout a range of more than two octaves. The programme include arias written for Andrea Nozzari, ‘creator’ of eight roles by Rossini, most notably his Otello. Nozzari’s was, apparently, a voice of unusual power and depth, so that the aria for Alfredo il Grande has a double-octave descending scale of B flat that takes in a low A before returning to the key-note, and in the middle section of the scena in Ricciardo e Zoraide ends on a held bass A flat. Ford’s voice may not be of comparable power (when I have heard him ‘in the flesh’ it has been with great pleasure but with the sense of a voice not quite getting away from its possessor); he does, however, encompass the low notes without thinning and the upper ones without strain. His legato is well tested in the appealing aria from Il marito e l’amante, in which he also shows a sweetness of tone that makes his singing a much more pleasant experience on record than that of other virtuoso American tenors, Chris Merritt and Rockwell Blake.
As for the music, it is all worth hearing and reinforces the contention that this period in operatic history has been inadequately assessed. In many instances, one can imagine that the score (especially in piano reduction) would look threadbare, yet sympathetically handled, as here under David Parry, a seeming banality can have a charge of energy and even an expressiveness that raise the spirits with remarkable effectiveness: the splendid (and theoretically preposterous) cabaletta in Pacini’s Carlo di Borgogna is an example.'