Puccini: Opera Arias / Angela Gheorghiu

Angela Gheorghiu

Puccini: Arias

Angela Gheorghiu's extensive discography on EMI Classics attests to the sheer number of roles that she has explored during her career. From Massenet's Manon and Bizet's Carmen, to Gounod's Juliette, she has proven that she has a unique vocal flexibility to tackle very varied repertoire. For this album, she returned to the repertoire for which she is arguably best suited and which brought her to a worldwide audience, in a recording of arias by Giacomo Puccini. In 1992 Angela Gheorghiu made her international debuts at Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Vienna's Staatsoper. Those who heard her perform knew that they were in the presence of a very special and rare talent. Since then she has never looked back, finding herself in demand by the opera houses all over the world and winning a staggering collection of major awards, including Gramophone and Diapason d’Or awards, the US Critics’ Award, the Caecilia Prize in Belgium and the prize from the Deutsche Schallplattenkritik. She has earned her place as one of the best sopranos of her generation and it has been said that her voice is '…perhaps the most instantly recognizable and interesting soprano voice of our time… a liquid instrument of great beauty…'. Puccini himself might well have been in agreement. Throughout his life, the soprano voice was the one he loved best, hence the amount of music he wrote for it. In this recording Angela Gheorghiu brings us some of Puccini’s best loved arias. A number of these are from La Bohème, including Sì. Mi chiamano Mimì and Donde lieta usci, both sung by Mimì. It is this opera and role which marked both Angela's graduation from the Bucharest Music Academy in 1990 and her international debut at Covent Garden, which shot her to stardom and brought her worldwide acclaim and today she is without parallel on stage in this repertoire. The disc also contains Un bel dì vedremo and Tu, tu piccolo Iddio from Madame Butterfly – the opera she would record with Maestro Pappano four years later and which just earned Angela a Gramophone Award. Angela Gheorghiu is accompanied on this recording by the Chorus of the Royal Opera House and the Orchestra sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi under the baton of Anton Coppola. Anton Coppola has had an extremely successful career as a conductor and a composer in the USA and as director of several opera houses. He has been honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Puccini Foundation and recognized by the Italian government as Cavaliere, Gran Ufficiale. He is currently the Artist Director of the Opera Tampa, the resident opera company in Tampa Bay, Florida.