Deutsche Grammophon Commemorates the Puccini Centenary with Music from Tosca

Featuring Eleonora Buratto, Jonathan Tetelman,
Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
and Daniel Harding

The label presents two excerpts captured in the opening week of Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia’s 2024–25 season, marking the official debut of its new Music Director, Daniel Harding

The Act Three duet for Floria Tosca and Mario Cavaradossi, “O dolci mani …
Amaro sol per te m’era il morire”, stars soprano Eleonora Buratto and tenor Jonathan Tetelman

  The Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and Daniel Harding
also perform the instrumental episode “Il bacio di Tosca”

Both tracks are released on the 100th anniversary of Puccini’s death,
29 November 2024 – listen here and here

Deutsche Grammophon will release the full recording of Tosca in spring 2025

As the Puccini anniversary year nears its end, the Yellow Label pays tribute to the composer with two of the many highlights of the season-opening of Tosca performed by the Orchestra e Coro dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome in late October. This  staging not only commemorated the Puccini anniversary but also marked the official debut of the new Santa Cecilia Music Director, Daniel Harding, conducting his first ever performances of Tosca, Puccini’s tragic opera set in 19th-century Rome. An exceptional cast was headed by Italian soprano Eleonora Buratto as Tosca, Chilean-American tenor and DG artist Jonathan Tetelman as Cavaradossi, and French baritone Ludovic Tézier as Scarpia. Deutsche Grammophon was in Rome to capture their performances – the subsequent recording launches an exciting new partnership with Daniel Harding and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia.

Offering a first glimpse of the audio album of Tosca, set to follow in spring 2025, both the third-act duet for Cavaradossi and Tosca, “O dolci mani … Amaro sol per te m’era il morire”, and “Il bacio di Tosca”, the instrumental epilogue to Act Two, will be released for streaming and download on 29 November 2024, exactly 100 years on from Puccini’s death. The filmed version of the full concert performance is available to stream now on STAGE+.

“It was a dream come true to sing Cavaradossi in Rome, with this wonderful orchestra,” says Jonathan Tetelman. “‘O dolci mani’ is an often overlooked episode,” he adds. “Tosca has just told Cavaradossi that she killed Scarpia with her bare hands and he sings about how beautiful those hands are. It’s a very tender moment, which develops into this dream they have of being free to live their lives – of course we know that this isn’t going to happen.”

Tetelman’s critically acclaimed second DG album, The Great Puccini, was recently honoured with the Gramophone Voice & Ensemble Award 2024. The magazine singled out “the young Puccini tenor of our day” for “a voice that’s bright and golden, immediately recognisable, coloured by a warm vibrato and with a ringing top for those Puccini money notes”. The Great Puccini presents extracts from nine operas, including Cavaradossi’s aria “E lucevan le stelle”.

Puccini continues to feature in Tetelman’s 2024–25 schedule: the tenor stars in a double bill of Il tabarro and Le ville in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (17, 19, 21 February), and reprises the role of Pinkerton in a new production of Madama Butterfly at Baden-Baden, opposite Eleonora Buratto, with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Kirill Petrenko (12–20 April). The same team gives two concert performances of Madama Butterfly at the Berlin Philharmonie (25 & 27 April), while Puccini will also be on the programme for Tetelman’s concerts in Munich and Prague (5 & 9 June).