The Italian tenor sings the world’s greatest Italian tenor arias, including the hit “Nessun dorma” – without question the most famous opera arias.
Verissimo meaning “very true” in Italian and is a play on the word “Verismo” – the late 19th century opera style from which these featured operas are taken. The style is known for its big passions, dramatic lyricism, lush orchestral sound and storylines about normal people in the throes of love, death, betrayal and revenge. Key composers of this style include Puccini, Mascagni, Cilea and Leoncavallo.

Charming salon miniatures and a grand funeral march by the verismo composer of La Gioconda.

Most of the pieces issued here were published in the 1870s and 1880s, and some of them are far more substantial than mere album-leaves. Yet they are hardly known at all; Riccardo Muti recorded an orchestration of the sombre and touching Elegia funebre from 1881, but Ester Fusar Poli’s new recording is the only available version of the piano original. Even more imposing in scale is the 16-minute Funeral March which Ponchielli wrote late in 1872 to honor the passing of the publisher Francesco Lucca. However, no Ponchielli album would be complete without a version of the ‘Dance of the Hours’ immortalized by Walt Disney’s hippos in Fantasia.

Ester Fusar Poli presents a beguiling sequence of elegies, nocturnes, polkas and tone-poems, demonstrating the composer’s expressive range and deft piano writing. An extensive essay by Gabriele Galleggiante Crisafulli considers Ponchielli’s piano output in the context of his career as a whole, making this album an important contribution to our understanding of a figure who was much more than a ‘one-hit wonder’.

When opera singers go from their standard repertoire into something new, from the stage to the recording studio or simply from one performance to another, the results may be better or worse, a great achievement or a great disappointment. None of which ever troubled Ettore Bastianini, whose renowned confidence in his own vocal and mental powers would not allow for those all too human failings which other performers may suffer in such circumstances. His authenticity and renown had their origins on stage of course, yet once he had taken that experience into the recording studio, a return to live performance often brought gains in authority and expressive power. The present series of previously unreleased recordings proves this admirably and they are all the more remarkable because they are certainly not the sort of material with which Bastianini felt most at home, (that was always a thoroughly Romantic repertoire, hence dominated by Verdi).

Critics, conductors and colleagues agree that Franco Bordoni’s voice, accent and interpretation constitute Verdi at his most noble. Which is hardly surprising given the singer’s awe of the composer and approach to his art. Bordoni had all the technique he needed to exploit to the full his voice’s volume, texture with its wealth of harmonics and two octave range with no uneven spots. The timbre and color of his voice made him the perfect dramatic baritone, a voice that saw its owner through years of unflagging, full-on performances.

When the ORFEO label was established in Munich forty years ago, surely no one with the music scene back then would have predicted that the record company would develop into a firmly established player on the classical music market. One of the label’s main priorities in the early years was vocal music, with opera rarities top of the list and since the mid 1980s the re-use of historic tape recordings. Big names featured on the label’s own productions, while ORFEO also developed into a talent factory by discovering and nurturing young artist. This “Legendary Voices” 10 album set for the anniversary of 40 years of ORFEO label history features eleven singers, who at their times upheld the art of opera singing and still uphold it in the best interpretation of nostalgia.

AMILCARE PONCHIELLI: Andrea Gruber; Marco Berti; Alberto Mastromarino; Carlo Colombara; Ildiko Komlosi; Elisabetta Fiorillo; Roberto Bolle, Letizia Giuliani, primi ballerini; Orchestra, Chorus and Corps de ballet of"Arena di Verona"/Donato Renzetti; Live recording: June 17, 2005 AMILCARE PONCHIELLI: La GiocondaNTSC All Region; Doby Digital 5.1, DTS; PCM Stereo 2.0; Color; 16:9; 162 minsSubtitled in Italian, English, French, German & Japanese.