Various: Passione, Freddie De Tommaso, tenor

Freddie De Tommaso’s Passione, released on Decca in April 2021, announced a British-Italian tenor’s arrival with real commercial force: the album debuted at No.1 on the UK Official Classical Artist Albums Chart, ahead of releases by Andrea Bocelli and Max Richter that same week — the first time a solo tenor album had opened at No.1 in two decades. It went on to win the Newcomer Award at the 2022 BBC Music Magazine Awards.

About the programme

Rather than assembling a generic cross-section of well-known operatic arias, Passione is built explicitly around De Tommaso’s own Italian heritage and the tenors he grew up admiring — including music marking the centenary of Franco Corelli, one of the mid-20th century’s most celebrated dramatic tenors. The programme draws heavily on Neapolitan song alongside operatic repertoire, a combination that lets a debut recital establish a specific, personal identity rather than functioning as a straightforward calling-card of vocal range and technique.

About the performer

De Tommaso trained at London’s Royal Academy of Music before establishing himself internationally in short order: First Prize, the Plácido Domingo Tenor Prize and the Verdi Prize at the 2018 Francisco Viñas International Singing Competition in Barcelona, a place in the Salzburg Festival’s Young Singer Academy the same year, and stage engagements including Cassio in Verdi’s Otello at Covent Garden in December 2019 and Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly at the reopening of the Vienna State Opera in September 2020, after the house’s pandemic closure. Passione arrived as his recording debut against that stage-built reputation, rather than the recording introducing an otherwise unknown singer.

Why the commercial reception matters

A classical vocal debut reaching No.1 on a national album chart, ahead of established crossover names, is a genuinely unusual outcome — most classical recital debuts, however well received critically, don’t register commercially at that scale. That combination of critical recognition (the BBC Music Magazine award) and chart performance made Passione a rare case of a classical recording breaking through in both registers at once, rather than succeeding in one at the expense of the other.

About the songs

The programme leans on some of the most enduring names in the Neapolitan song repertoire — Marechiare, Dicitencello vuje, Fenesta che lucive, Core ‘ngrato, and the title track Passione itself among them — alongside Tosti’s Ideale and Leoncavallo’s Mattinata, a song Leoncavallo (better known as the composer of the opera Pagliacci) wrote specifically for early recording technology, making it one of the first pieces of music ever composed with a phonograph session in mind rather than a concert hall. Pairing that repertoire with the Corelli-centenary material gives the disc a double frame of reference: De Tommaso’s own family heritage in Naples and southern Italy, and a specific lineage of Italian tenors he positions his own singing within.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh for mmmusic — it’s new coverage of a real, well-documented recording, not part of the site’s recovered archive from its original run as an Edinburgh CD shop between 1991 and 2018. Every fact here has been independently verified rather than assumed.