Noble renegades? Here, they’re often simply loud. Charles Castronovo – featured on some 25 recordings and DVDs over the 20 years that he has been singing major roles – is overdue a mainstream aria collection, though this one isn’t likely to enhance his already considerable stature. The choice of early and mid-period Verdi scenes – often more than just arias, with chorus and secondary characters – prompts such similar vocal and dramatic responses from Castronovo that the collection, while superficially impressive, lapses into artistically limited sameness.

The choice of repertoire is partly to blame. Opening with arias from the five-act French version of Don Carlos, one is reminded of the dramatic texture that Verdi’s tenor roles acquired in his later works, and how well Castronovo has mastered singing French (and, later in the album, Italian). Less-textured arias and scenes that follow, though, are full of worthy music but remain strongly wedded to 19th-century operatic conventions that eclipse the varied personalities in this rogue’s gallery and give them often the same emotional temperature. Among the lesser-known operas here, there’s surprising kinship between Rodolfo, the nobleman in disguise in Luisa Miller, Oronte loving a woman who should be his enemy in I Lombardi, Gaston in Jérusalem (the I Lombardi rewrite), Jacopo in I due Foscari, facing exile amid wrongful murder convictions, and Corrado, the pirate-ship captain in Il corsaro.

Castronovo sings them using the same vocal mechanics, most noticeable in his way of rising to higher ranges – not in lighter, floating tones but in his burly chest voice, causing the tone to spread a bit, and calling more attention to the effort behind the singing than to the anguish of the character. In a number of instances, recitatives and cavatinas are marked for softer singing, partly in keeping with the text, partly to give the singer room to build to a later climax. Even amid Castronovo’s promising expressivity in the start of Macduff’s Act 4 scene in Macbeth – and his sense of overall contour in the aria ‘Ah, la paterna mano’ – he delivers too many blasts of fortissimo. Elsewhere, Castronovo is prone towards exclamatory entrances and continues on trajectories in which one can hear where he’s taking a phrase well before he gets there.

The more evolved Ballo excerpt should provide more relief than it does. Castronovo gives ‘Forse la soglia attinse’ the same kind of singing as everything else in this June 2022 recording, though his live Ballo 18 months later at the Metropolitan Opera (December 2023) prompts a different kind of mixed reaction: he builds recklessly in the viscerally thrilling manner of Giovanni Martineau (1885-1969) but with untidy singing that makes one fear for his vocal health.

Castronovo is a long, long way from the Verdi recordings gathered together in the 2004 Carlo Bergonzi collection of Verdi arias (Philips). Is the comparison unfair with such a different tenor voice? Not when these lesser-heard arias are sung by Bergonzi with such elegance, accuracy and precision of meaning. One must credit Castronovo for maintaining a firm sense of line that occasionally taxes Bergonzi. But Bergonzi also benefits from conductors such as Nello Santi, steeped in the Italian style. In contrast, the Kaunas City package – including the particularly good bass Tadas Girininkas in the Luisa Miller Act 2 excerpt – has the reasonably engaged conductor Constantine Orbelian, who is best when Verdi’s orchestral accompaniments give him more to do. But the main challenge with early Verdi – heard less often from Orbelian – is finding the purposes behind the young composer putting his own stamp on received operatic wisdom.