Earlier this summer, Jonas Kaufmann, The world s greatest tenor (The Telegraph), performed his most popular Italian repertoire live at Waldbühne, Berlin s outdoor amphitheater. The smash-success live concert was recorded for Kaufmann s new album, An Italian Evening. Kaufmann brought-the-house-down with a succession of hits from his extremely popular Dolce Vita album as well as exciting arias and duets (with mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili) from the Italian opera repertoire including Volare, Non ti scordar di me and Nessun Dorma.

On stage they’re usually rivals, but in real life Jonas Kaufmann and Ludovic Tézier share a close friendship. After many live performances together these two extraordinary artists have recorded their first duet album: “Insieme”, meaning “together” in Italian, to be released on Sony Classical. Accompanied by the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia under Antonio Pappano, they present duets they’ve sung together on stage, plus works specially chosen for the album.

This recording marks ground zero of the Three Tenors phenomenon and reminds you of all that it was supposed to be. There's only one tenor here–Luciano Pavarotti–and because he's partnered by different voice types–soprano Joan Sutherland and mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne– the possibilities of substantial artistic collaboration are much greater. Though this event was heavily hyped and would've driven audiences wild no matter what, the singers use the concert as an occasion to do things they'd never do on the opera stage, such as the Sutherland-Pavarotti duet from Otello". In their prime, they were one of the great operatic teams, as were Sutherland and Horne. And this concert gives ample evidence why. It's essential for fans of these singers.

Tenor Jonathan Tetelman has already earned a reputation in the opera world as a dedicated, distinctive and versatile artist. Having signed an exclusive agreement with DG last autumn, he has now recorded his debut DG album, Arias, released 12 August 2022. With his agile technique, dramatic eloquence and rich palette of vocal colours, Tetelman here inhabits a range of roles from the French and Italian repertoire. DG is pleased to have been able to record the album in the unique acoustics of the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and to work with such supportive partners as the Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria and its Music Director Karel Mark Chichon.

Newcomers to the music of the 19th century sometimes wonder why there are so few Italian compositions in genres of "absolute" music: symphonies, chamber music, piano sonatas. As the booklet notes for this release on the fine German audiophile label MDG point out, the reason is that the institutions supporting these genres were almost completely absent in Italy, whose musical life was organized around the opera. The exception was the municipal wind band, which served as a regional training ground for opera orchestra musicians. This album presents a group of all-but-unknown small chamber pieces for winds by Amilcare Ponchielli, best known for his opera La Gioconda and specifically for the Dance of the Hours instrumental interlude, known to pop fans as "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh."

My late, lamented colleague, Michael Oliver, would have exulted at the prospect of reviewing this hardly-ever-heard example of verismo, a genre (like so many others) of which he made a speciality. Ponchielli’s last opera appears never to have been recorded before, and has received few performances, even in Italy, after its comparatively successful première at La Scala in 1885.