For his debut on Warner Classics, Samoan tenor Pene Pati matches favourite showpiece arias with rarer operatic gems in a programme of Verdi, Rossini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer, Gounod and Benjamin Godard. Pati has been called “a revelation … stunning for his generosity of voice, top notes of apparently invincible power, and alluring timbre,“ (Forum Opéra) and praised for his “gleaming, sensuous stream of sound” (San Francisco Chronicle). A singer of glowing lyricism who establishes an immediate rapport with his audience, Pati hopes that the album will leave listeners with a sense of “warmth, tenderness, and the sincerity of storytelling. To me, this is the essence of opera and the reason why I sing.” He is joined by conductor Emmanuel Villaume and the Orchestre national Bordeaux Aquitaine.

Meyerbeer composed Il Crociato in just over one year, between September 1822 and the following autumn, at the end of the German composer's so-called "Italian period". Although this is an opera of great dramatic and musical complexity its première was highly successful with both audience and critics, one commentator accurately describing it as "a building of highlyapplauded construction". The plot, so rich in events, skilfully weaves historical-religious elements with private happenings and feelings. Against the background of the interreligious conflict between Christians and Muslims, the story of the main characters unfolds in an efficacious alternation of grand choral scenes and solo numbers with arias and cabalettas.

This is the debut album of Benjamin Bernheim, signed to the Deutsche Grammophon after several sensational appearances with major opera companies. Like many other debuts, it mixes French and Italian arias, with an odd Tchaikovsky item thrown in, but pay attention, and it will be apparent that Bernheim is a cut above. Raised in Switzerland, he has perhaps a natural way with both French and Italian music. You get the feeling, though, that Bernheim could sing almost anything and make it convincing. His voice is not big, but it has many shades, and he falls easily into the grooves of Massenet and Verdi without seeming to shift gears in any way.

Dynamic, which has already in its catalogue a few neglected operas by Massenet, has the pleasure to offer another rarity by this composer, this Chérubin recorded live in Cagliari in 2006 year. The old Mozartian Cherubino of Le nozze di Figaro is no longer the young lad in his first naive contacts with women: his age moved on from 13 to 17 years and, of course, takes on more adolescent connotations. Massenet brings these aspects out well as he characterises Chérubin with vocal scoring that favours ample, intensely cantabile phrases, with leaps towards the acute register that give full vent to the lyrical soprano voice, with moments of sudden emphasis and equally rapid disappointments - a real tempest of hormones, light years away from the Voi che sapete of Mozart’s page boy.