Piotr Beczala & Helmut Deutsch – Rachmaninoff & Tchaikovsky: Romances (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:20:59 minutes | 2,66 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Star tenor Piotr Beczala presents a selection of romances by Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, together with the acclaimed lied accompanist Helmut Deutsch. The romance was the most popular musical genre in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russia, practised by professionals as well as amateurs. Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff both enriched this genre with their lyricism and melodic invention. Elevated by Deutsch’s splendid accompaniment, Beczala delivers these songs with a great sense for the Slavic idiom and meaning of the words, combined with colourful lyricism and italianità, perfectly fitting the Russian and cosmopolitan musical language of these two masters.
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Natalie Dessay, Valery Gergiev, Vladislav Sulimsky, Piotr Beczala, Ilya Bannik, Mariinsky Orchestra and Mariinsky Chorus – Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor (2011)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:11:04 minutes | 2,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Mariinsky
The Mariinsky label’s opera recordings have garnered acclaim and awards from around the world, most recently for Valery Gergiev’s recording of Parsifal released in 2010. For the label’s fifth opera, Gergiev conducts Donizetti’s masterpiece with a magnificent cast led by Natalie Dessay.
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Piotr Beczala, Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana & Marco Boemi – Vincerò! (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 52:54 minutes | 981 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Global star tenor Piotr Beczala presents Vincerò!, the first fruit of his exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE. Vincerò! is a collection of heart-wrenching opera arias by Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Giordano and Cilea. For Beczala, this recording documents his vocal transition from the lyrical tenor repertoire to the more dramatic roles of Verismo, and thus simultaneously marks a significant new chapter in his stage career. Beczala is accompanied by the Cor de la Generalitat Valenciana and the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, led by maestro Marco Boemi; an extraordinary singers conductor who has worked with the greatest vocalists of our age. Piotr Beczala has the kind of voice you want to hang medals on. Its luminosity makes many of his fellow lyric tenors, past and present, sound by comparison like flickering candlewicks. Beczalas clarity and cleanliness of tone are the essence of his appeal. (Opera News Awards, 2015)
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Piotr Beczala, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Łukasz Borowicz – Heart’s Delight – The Songs of Richard Tauber (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:34 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical, Opera
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
It is mostly operetta enthusiasts who remember the name of the monocle-wearing Austrian tenor Richard Tauber today, and that’s why this release by Polish tenor Piotr Beczala is welcome. Tauber was an enormously popular figure in many countries, singing in many languages, from the 1910s through the end of his life, unhappily exiled from his native Austria due to Jewish ancestry, after World War II. It’s not clear whether Tauber’s languages included Polish, but the program here involves German, English, and Italian. Beczala’s German is excellent; his English is slightly accented, but probably less so than Tauber’s own, and there are no distractions to impede the enjoyment of Tauber’s biggest hit, You Are My Heart’s Delight, from Franz Lehár’s The Land of Smiles. That and a few other similar numbers set the pattern for operetta and later film musical composers who tried to tailor their big numbers to Tauber’s strengths. The composers here range from the well known (Lehár) to the moderately known (Emmerich Kálmán) to the all-but-forgotten (Rudolf Sieczynski and several of the film film composers), but all the music seems of a piece, and in a style consistent enough to be familiar. That style straddled the divide between operetta and popular song; it is extravagantly romantic, almost strangely so from a modern perspective, filled with the rhythms of the waltz and other popular dances, but exploding often enough into the upper tenor register to give the singer some star quality. Beczala, something of a connoisseur’s tenor up to this point, handles the high Bs nicely, and there is just a sense of fun about the whole thing that puts across something of what Tauber must have been like. You get an aural whiff of Tauber himself in track 7, Du bist die Welt für mich (You are the world to me), which he also composed; this could have had an odd necro-duet feel, but it is tastefully handled, with the Tauber excerpt, recorded in 1934, coming in at the end as a sort of memory. An enjoyable major-label debut for operetta lovers.
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