Beniamino Gigli: Milan, London and Berlin Recordings (Rec 1933-1935)

"You should add this one to the collection ... the only risk being that you will probably have to buy the preceding seven volumes as well"
- MusicWeb Jan 2007

This disc includes some of Gigli's best-loved and bestselling 78 rpm records, performances when he was in the full plenitude of his powers, fêted as a popular tenor all over the world and consequently loved by audiences far beyond those who heard him in the opera house. The tenor's singing, alternately impassioned or smiling, appealed to the hearts of all those who could recognise a singer of the people and one who wanted above all to please his hearers. Yet there was nothing the least calculated about what he achieved. Gigli was among the most natural of singers and, as can be seen in films made contemporaneously with these recordings, he was genuinely a person who felt deeply and sincerely, inspired by basic emotions. Indeed the lack of complication or any hint of intellectualism in his singing was the basis of his success. Superior persons did and still do complain of a touch of vulgarity in his performances, decry his resort to gulps, even sobs, but these were part and parcel of the Gigli persona and without them he would not have been the same singer.