Puccini - O mio babbino caro

I vane done a lot of opera, but could not resist recording this wonderful aria by Giacomo Puccini. The comical opera "Gianni Schichi" was composed in 1917-18, and Lauretta's short but poignant aria "O mio babbino caro" is Puccini's best loved and most well-known melodies, and indeed one of the most popular arias of the entire opera repertoire. For those interested, here is a link to the score on MPSLP :
s9.imslp.org/f...
This is based on the vocal score, which I assume to have been compiled by Puccini himself. This version has a short added intro which is not found in the vocal score, and the author of which is unknown to me.
Chris Breemer, piano
buymeacoffee.c...
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Recording date: Monday April 15, 2024
Piano: Kawai Novus NV10S
Setting: SK-EX Rendering
Postprocessing: Concert Hall Light reverb
Art work: 1918-1919 poster by Leopoldo Metlicovitz

[@RileyTuckerMusic]

Bravo Chris!

[@grahamtwist]

A beautiful performance, Chris: bravo! I first fell in love with this aria when I heard it used in the soundtrack to the 1985 film, 'A Room with a View' - sung by the great Kiri Te Kanawa. The melodies and harmonies of Puccini never disappoint . . . and nor does your piano playing!

[@ChrisBreemer]

Thanks Graham ! Ah, Kiri te Kanawa... I have always loved her voice and I'm particularly fond of her two LP's of the Canteloube Chants d'Auvergne. I'm not much of an opera lover as yet, although I have much enjoyed Peter Grimes, The Bartered Bride, Rusalka, Khovanchina, and Repighi's Belfagor. I really need to work on that. Puccini first, I guess 😍

[@davidcallahan2832]

Thank you for this. It is ravishing. I love to play transcriptions of Puccini's arias for the challenge of achieving a singing tone in the vocal melody. I find that having the human voice already in my head forces me to make the keys really sing the notes and have them stand apart from the accompaniment. Thanks too for providing a link to the sheet music for this , which I just downloaded. It used to be hard to come by free editions of Puccini's scores. Once I had to buy the entire score of "Turandot" with piano reduction just to get the aria "In questa reggia," and I still have not found a way to play both the vocal and orchestral parts in a number of passages. Fortunately, with this one it looks like a fairly simple task to include the vocal line in the right hand in the few places where the accompaniment does not follow it exactly. You did it, and it sounds wonderful.

[@ChrisBreemer]

Thank you David ! I'm glad you liked it, especially as you seem to be a real Puccini fan. I think my rendition could have done with a bit more freedom, but I always seem to be rather inhibited despite all the good intentions. Yes, this arrangement falls comfortably under the fingers, the singing line is mostly included in the RH chords. I did add some notes in various places, and took the liberty to change one or two notes that sounded wrong to me (I'm not above correcting the composer if I think it sounds better 😉). I was just looking at the vocal Turandot score by Alfano, and "In questa reggia" looks ill-suited to the piano without a voice or extra hand. I would not really know how to make it work, even without all these tremolos emulating surging strings.