Given that Javier Camarena has been a regular guest on many of the great opera stages for at least the past decade, his recorded output is relatively slender, with several appearances on record alongside Cecilia Bartoli, who supported the release of his first major album, ‘Contrabandista’, released some four years ago (Decca, 12/18). That album was warmly welcomed in these pages by Mark Pullinger and saw Camarena build a programme around the life and roles of historical
(bari-)tenor Manuel García, mainly featuring a mixture of works by Rossini and García himself.

Now, on his debut for Pentatone, the Mexican tenor offers a more straightforward tribute to Gaetano Donizetti. In a personal note in the booklet, Camarena describes Donizetti as ‘the composer who had the biggest impact on my life and my career’; arguably he’s also the composer most ideally suited to the tenor’s voice as it is today.

And Camarena’s affection for – and experience of – Donizetti comes through clearly throughout the whole album. The performances are defined by his easy charm, swagger and top notes, as well as a musicianship and sense of style that he seems to have been quietly refining over the past few years. The voice, too, is in great condition: bright, sunny and easy flowing, and with what feels like an ever-firmer technical foundation.

What’s admirable, too, is the way that the programme – devised, one assumes, in conversation with the album’s conductor, Riccardo Frizza, music director of the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo – largely steers clear of the standard showpieces. It would have been so easy for Camarena to throw in party pieces such as Tonio’s top-C-laden ‘Ah! mes amis’ from La fille du régiment, for example, which he’s made a habit of encoring in performance.

We do have ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ from L’elisir d’amore, true, but otherwise the repertoire takes us quite a way from the beaten track. Following the welcome recent trend with operatic recitals, we mainly have longer scenes, replete with contributions from chorus and additional characters. It’s all testament to the seriousness of the enterprise, and it proves rewarding indeed.

Camarena, Frizza and Gli Originale – the Donizetti Festival’s bespoke period-instrument band – bring a freshness and commitment to everything they perform. The orchestra is especially fine in the longer introductions to several of the featured scenes – to ‘Notte d’orrore’, for example, showcasing beautifully characterised wind solos, or to the Caterina Cornaro extract, with its stormy urgency and ominously tolling bell. The solo work is superb, with a mellifluous trumpet solo in Don Pasquale’s ‘Povero Ernesto!’ and a beautifully plangent bassoon in the L’elisir aria; wind interjections throughout are lively and engaged.

Above all, there’s simply an enormous amount to enjoy in Camarena’s singing, right from the ranz des vaches-like solo that opens the first track, from Betly – a real rarity, premiered in Naples in 1836 and distantly based on a Singspiel by Goethe. He brings a lovely ardour to the cavatinas and is reliably swashbuckling in the cabalettas, while the voice, a good-size instrument, can still negotiate the patter and coloratura of the aria from the early Rossinian Il giovedì grasso, written for Rubini, very respectably. Only occasionally does the sound lose a little focus and sheen, but that seems like carping when it comes to performances of such technical assurance and élan.

But this album is so much more than a vocal showcase. Camarena, vividly abetted by Frizza, brings dramatic urgency to everything he does, giving a strong sense of the characters represented and their various dilemmas. There’s a tangible sense of hopelessness and lost love in the prison scene from Roberto Devereux, for example, and listen out for the shuddering and shivering Frizza gets from his players after ‘tutto m’ingombra di terror le vene’ around the 2'45" mark in the extended opening recitative (track 4).

The dark brooding of the Maria di Rudenz aria is no less compelling, with an especially melting performance of the cavatina, while there’s a real dramatic bite to the Marino Faliero scene, especially in the cabaletta, dotted with excursions into the tenor stratosphere – although here Camarena seems to tire a little as he gets on to the home straight. The scene from Caterina Cornaro is yet another highlight, the cavatina beautifully open-hearted and the cabaletta so rousing that it would get even the most devoted pacifist marching off to war.

All in all, with fine engineering and presentation from Pentatone, this is a hugely enjoyable and unusually satisfying and engaging operatic recital from a singer at the top of his game – a superb album that does Signor Gaetano himself proud.