The ten songs that make up Belcanto songs, the new album by Juan Diego Flórez, considered the best tenor bel canto worldwide, can be listened to in full, free and exclusively, with EL PAÍS. The album is available today and in the coming weeks on the newspaper’s website, before its release on any other platform, as part of the celebration of 50 years of EL PAÍS. It can be heard directly through the playlist on this same page or downloaded to devices. The reader will also find an in-depth interview with Juan Diego Flórez in The weekly country this week, where the tenor looks back on his impressive career and reflects on what makes the album special.
In Belcanto Songs Flórez defends himself solely with his voice and the accompaniment of Vicenzo Scalera, a regular pianist at his concerts as he was, previously, at those of José Carreras or Montserrat Caballé. “It’s not opera, even if they are opera composers: it’s very intimate music, composed for living rooms and to be sung with a piano,” he explains about the ten pieces by Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, among the greatest Italian authors. These plays were not written for a salon but for a very small audience, a common practice in the 19th century. “Before, there were private rooms with pianos and these songs were written for those who were there, we created an almost private atmosphere, designed for small places. They were dedicated to famous people.”
For example, there is Ricordance, whose unbeatable melody that Bellini would later give to Elvira, the heroine of I, puritan, in his most famous tune. Bellini also signs Malinconia, gentile nymph, “an ode to melancholy”, according to the tenor. Rossini, one of Flórez’s favorite composers (he has been called “the best Rossini tenor in history”), has some of the longest songs, although they are also the most fun: there is “an ode to wine, women and pleasure” called The Orgia and another who talks about the sins of old age (L’Esule). “Rossini was a master of extreme vocality,” Flórez summarizes.
“These songs are far from being operatic because they lack, let’s say, this extroversion,” develops the tenor. “But there’s drama, there’s opera in them. They’re gems.” Break. “Well. Little gems.”
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