Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #151931 in Music
• Released on: 2002-07-22
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .23 pounds
• Running time: 52 minutes

Customer Reviews

Oh dear oh dear...
It gives me no pleasure at all to say that anyone with half an ear for good singing can tell within a few seconds that this is a voice going nowhere -as the last few years since this debut recital album have proved. This makes the previous rave reviews even more inexplicable; where do these people keep their ears? Licitra's technique is fundamentally faulty: he has a slow wobble even in the lower reaches of the voice and as he goes up the tone becomes cloudy and throaty - real problems around the so-called "passaggio" where a tenor can easily crack into the falsetto. The overall effect is of an ugly, unharmonious, effortful sound made by an improperly registered voice. He needs to start from scratch and listen to some better voices -as there are virtually no teachers who can help. That's how Del Monaco and Corelli got it right. Robert Levine is usually a very reliable crtic - but his mind cannot have been focused on the job in hand if he truly believed what he wrote in the official Amazon review; NJ Keith, on the other hand, is spot on.

P.S. I am reliably informed that Licitra can sound very much better live than he does here - in which case, while I can go only on how he sounds recorded, I am perfectly willing to believe that he is part of a distinguished club of singers who invariably come over better on stage: Gwyneth Jones, Joan Sutherland and Callas herself, come to mind - but these are all sopranos and I wonder how it is that Licitra's faults are unnoticeable live, but I haven't myself heard him and am not encouraged to do so by what I hear on this CD. Oh well.