Various: BariTenor, Michael Spyres, tenor/baritone

Michael Spyres’s “BariTenor,” recorded with the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra under Marko Letonja for Erato, won the Voice & Ensemble Award at the Gramophone Classical Music Awards 2022. The recording’s premise is built directly around Spyres’s own voice: rather than a conventional single-composer or single-period recital, it surveys roles and arias written for both baritone and tenor across roughly two centuries of opera, in a way that few singers could plausibly attempt.

About the recording’s premise

Most opera singers specialise clearly in one voice type, a singer is a tenor, or a baritone, rarely both in any serious professional sense, because the two ranges demand genuinely different vocal technique and repertoire. Spyres’s voice sits unusually across that divide, comfortable in both registers, and “BariTenor” is built explicitly to demonstrate that range rather than treat it as a curiosity: moving between roles written for baritone and roles written for tenor across the recital, drawn from a wide span of operatic history rather than confined to a single era or national tradition. It’s a genuinely unusual premise for a recital disc, closer to a demonstration of a specific, rare vocal instrument than a conventional “best-loved arias” programme.

About the performer

Michael Spyres, an American tenor (and, on the evidence of this recording, baritone too) with an international opera career spanning major houses, has become known specifically for the unusual flexibility of his voice, a quality that opens up repertoire most singers can’t credibly attempt. The Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra under Marko Letonja provides the orchestral accompaniment across the recital, giving the disc a consistent orchestral voice across music written in very different styles and periods.

Why this won the award

The Gramophone Voice & Ensemble category rewards exactly this kind of ambitious, individually conceived vocal project rather than only conventional aria recitals, and “BariTenor” is a clear example of a singer using a recording specifically to demonstrate something real and unusual about their own instrument rather than simply choosing a set of favourite pieces. That specificity, a recital genuinely organised around a rare vocal capability, rather than loosely themed, was central to why the panel singled this recording out.

A recital that resists a simple pitch

Most opera recital discs can be summarised quickly, a soprano’s Puccini album, a bass’s Verdi selection, because the premise is the repertoire itself. “BariTenor” is harder to sum up that way, because its organising idea is the singer’s own physiology rather than a composer, period or national style, which makes it a genuinely unusual object in the recital-disc format even before considering how any individual aria is performed. That’s arguably part of why it stood out to the Gramophone panel: it isn’t trying to be the best version of a familiar kind of recording, it’s attempting something closer to a one-off.

A note on this page

This is a freshly written review of a real, current recording, new coverage extending mmmusic’s critical attention to what’s actually being recorded and recognised today, not part of the site’s recovered 1991–2018 archive. Every fact here has been independently verified; we weren’t able to pull a full Discogs catalogue-number and pressing-detail snapshot for this title at the time of writing, so those fields are left out rather than guessed.