Duets (2007)

Soprano Anna Netrebko and tenor Rolando Villazón are paired here in "opera's greatest love duets," music that allows their ample and expressive voices to soar. Villazón has been compared to Domingo for the quality of his tone, his vocal discipline, and the expressiveness of his interpretations, and these elements are all in evidence here. In "È il sol dell'anima," from Rigoletto, the intensity of his characterization is especially penetrating. The purity of Netrebko's tone and the youthful innocence she expresses so ... Read More

Soprano Anna Netrebko and tenor Rolando Villazón are paired here in "opera's greatest love duets," music that allows their ample and expressive voices to soar. Villazón has been compared to Domingo for the quality of his tone, his vocal discipline, and the expressiveness of his interpretations, and these elements are all in evidence here. In "È il sol dell'anima," from Rigoletto, the intensity of his characterization is especially penetrating. The purity of Netrebko's tone and the youthful innocence she expresses so persuasively are hugely touching; in her final lines of the first scene of La bohème, before Mimì and Rodolfo leave the stage, she sounds so blissfully and simply happy that the awareness of the couple's fate makes the moment unbearably poignant. One intriguing element of the album is having each singer join in a duet from the repertoire that's the other singer's specialty, so there is a selection from Tchaikovsky's Iolanta in Russian, and from Torroba's 1932 zarzuela Luisa Fernanda in... Read Less