It was only a matter of time, but listening to this first baritone album from Plácido Domingo, the timing seems right. The septuagenarian singer (for some people, truly, age is a state of mind, and sometimes of voice) has been building up his baritone roles for a few years now, starting with Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, progressing through the same composer's Rigoletto, Nabucco and onwards. And truth be told, though his charisma has never dimmed, the voice sometimes has missed that special tinta, the baritonal snarl that is the mark of a true Verdian baritone. On the evidence of this album, he has found something just as convincing.
Domingo was always an intelligent artist and, clearly realizing that he was never going to sound like a born baritone á la the great Ettore Bastianini or Tito Gobbi, say, he has searched for something else in his sound. And just as his voice now defies easy categorization, living as it does between baritone and tenor, he has internalized that otherness--on this new album of Verdi arias for Sony, he often turns his interpretations inward, finding a sense of real loneliness or detachment. And if there's one thing you can say about Verdi's baritones, it's that they're frequently men apart. The self-loathing of Rigoletto, the perpetual discomfort of Boccanegra (a man forced to give up the life on the high seas to take on the heavy, land-locked burdens of statehood), the maddened jealousy of Renato in Un ballo in maschera, these all make their marks through Domingo's voice now. At times they seem to scar themselves onto his soul.
The somber mood finds its echo in Pablo Heras-Casado's conducting of the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana. This is Verdi by way of Brecht, alienated and apart. But passion comes through, not least in the magnificently sung Council Chamber Scene from Boccanegra. I don't have a complete cast list to hand, incidentally, but I'll bet a few of my Domingo CDs that the tenor in the ensemble is also Domingo, and though I don't think the second baritone is him as well, that would have been a nice nod to the famous old recording of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov where the star bass Boris Christoff sang all three major roles. But it's surprisingly convincing here, and Domingo's strain at the tenor's top notes actually only accentuates that character's pain.
Domingo started his career as a baritone--well, a Spanish zarzuela baritone, which are not as heavy as their Verdian colleagues. He now joins the very rarified ranks of successful tenors who also had success in the lower voice category (plenty have gone the other way). The Chilean tenor Ramón Vinay was one other, but others have tended to make the switch early on while their voices were still settling down (Leo Nucci and Dwayne Croft are two baritones that spring to mind). And Domingo shows no signs of tiring of his new-old register--August 2013 brings a further baritone role in Verdi's Goivanna d'Arco at Salzburg, and November will see his Count di Luna in Il trovatore (more Verdi--well, it is his big anniversary year) in Berlin.
Here's a clip of Domingo singing Nabucco at Covent Garden.
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