As if in answer to last month’s Singertalk, a major company issues a recital by this admirable tenor – and not before time. It is eight years since his debut recital was recorded on Claves (11/92), and despite his notable successes in the world’s leading opera houses (not to mention a warm recommendation in these columns) this long and precious span of youth in a tenor’s career has been allowed to pass without another recital as follow-up. Happily the voice as recorded has changed little, the fresh bloom of 1991 being only slightly affected by its steady but judicious usage, which in turn has brought experience and authority.
The earlier disc confined itself to Rossini and Donizetti, while the new one has a wider scope and includes at least one surprise in Lensky’s aria from Eugene Onegin, sung in Russian. The performance is a good one but, though a welcome extension, it suggests a limitation that is felt in some degree when he sings in Italian too. He has not yet the art of infusing the voice with emotions: he can express but not quite ‘be’. Still, his gifts and achievements are real enough. The voice is a clear, unforced lyric tenor, singing, in this programme, exactly what is right for it. Flexible and capable of softness, it is put scrupulously to the service of the music, guided by a well-schooled feeling for phrase and carry-over (for instance, in the lovely ‘linkage’ of the reprise in ‘Angelo casto e bel’). His French is good, and the Dream Song from Manon is a particularly skilled and tasteful piece of singing. To Roberto Devereux’s cabaletta and in declamatory recitative he brings spirit and energy without bluster, and the aria from Un ballo in maschera shows something of what may lie in him for the future, both in expressive capability and in the voice itself.
He is working here with the same conductor as in the still-available and recommended recital on Claves. The orchestra is different, with playing less refined than that of the English Chamber Orchestra, but still alert and responsive. The recorded sound is slightly more reverberant but clear and well balanced.'