Currently appearing 
at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as Cavaradossi, tenor Massimo Giordano’s debut album will be released shortly. An exclusive BMG artist, the Italian tenor has recorded signature arias by Italian composers such as Verdi, Puccini and Giordano including arias from, among others, Don Carlo, Manon Lescaut and Andrea Chénier on a disc entitled ‘Amore e tormento’.
Born in Pompei into a working class family, Giordano did not get in contact with a profound musical education until he decided to move to Trieste to study classical singing and flute. He made his debut in Spoleto in Massenet’s Werther.
After conquering the opera stages in Italy, Massimo Giordano began singing in all the major, international houses of the world, including La Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Vienna State Opera and the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.
He has performed with some major names in the opera world, including Anna Netrebko, Angela Gheorghiu and Natalie Dessay, as well as collaborating with conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Fabio Luisi, James Levine and Marco Armiliato.
Massimo talks about his Neapolitan roots in a short video here.
Later this season, Giordano will be singing in Faust (Gounod) in Hamburg, Don Carlo at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Foresto (Attila) in Berlin.
This is the first classical solo artist to sign with BMG since its separation from Sony in 2008.
Photograph © BMG
About BMG
BMG is an international group of music companies focused on the management of music rights. BMG covers the entire range of rights administration, development, and exploitation, placing the needs of songwriters and artists at the core of its business model. Since its founding in 2008, BMG has established a presence in eight core music markets and represents the rights of more than a million songs and recordings including Crosstown, Cherry Lane, Stage Three, Evergreen, Chrysalis and Bug as well as signed a number of prominent artists and songwriters. BMG is a joint venture between the international media company Bertelsmann and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., a leading global alternative asset manager. The company trades under the name BMG Chrysalis in the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Sweden following the acquisition of Chrysalis plc.
thing to say about this recording is that one needs to put out of one’s mind most of the famous recordings that have preceded it since what one is accustomed to hear from the Callas, Sutherland, Caballé recordings or even further back excerpts from Cigna or Ponselle is a radically different work of art. Giovanni Antonini, Riccardo Minasi and Maurizio Biondihave spent years scraping away the barnacles of dubious performance tradition and updated instrumentation and restoring hundreds of small cuts that have become part of the standard performing edition. As with a restored oil painting the removal of years of accumulation has revealed a very different work of art. Indeed I would say that it redefines the work both in terms of sound and in appropriate casting.
attended Sunday’s “Flórez and Friends” concert at the Barbican – as opposed to sitting through oceans of orchestral filler in the RFH in order to dribble over the unfeasible length of Jonas Kaufmann’s ‘Wälse’ – you may be forgiven for wondering how an audience already in a state of chronic, uncritical delight could possibly be pleasured any more. In which case, you needed to be at tonight’s solo recital, the latest tranche of Juan Diego Flórez’s Barbican residency, which comprehensively proved the time-honoured adage “it ain’t over until the sooty-lashed one sings at least four encores”. The nubile bounced around, whooping; the mature squirmed with satisfaction in their seats, emitting the odd low moan; I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the lame weren’t seen dancing in the aisles, and the dead – always a fair percentage of any opera audience – weren’t newly-risen. Indeed, anyone suffering with scrofula could well have been cured merely by touching his immaculately tailored trousers (though I’m still working out how to explain this to the police).
In a pivotal scene in Verdi’s early opera, Pope Leo squares up to the defiant Attila, causing the Hun to turn tail. Here, two leading Slavic basses – Russian Ildar Abdrazakov and Bulgarian Orlin Anastassov – go head to head in the title role, but it proves to be something of an uneven contest due both to their supporting casts and the conditions in which the two performances were captured on film. Both are fairly traditionally staged and costumed, which should satisfy those pining for the days when Huns looked like Huns, but a few minutes viewing of each disc is enough to separate the wheat from the operatic chaff. In the blue corner, Arturo Gama’s production from the Mariinsky Theatre, released on its own label; in the red corner, a rudderless affair laughably attributed to director Plamen Kartaloff, recorded in the ruins of the Bulgarian fortress of Tsaverets.
