DESCRIPTION:
00:00 "Prendi, l'anel ti dono", from Bellini's La Sonnambula (Movie: Laugh, Pagliacci)
02:37 "Ombra mai fu", from Handel's Xerxes/Serse (London, 1933)
04:18 "Addio alla madre", from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana (Vitaphone Varieties, 1927)
06:53 "Cielo e mar", from Ponchielli's La Gioconda (Vitaphone Varieties, 1927)
09:15 "O sole mio", by Eduardo di Capua
11:04 "Non ti scordar di me" (Movie: Non Ti Scordar Di Me, 1935)

-------------------------------------

What soaring, liquid, golden flow of beautiful tone! and the most beautiful mezza voce, for sure... Franco Corelli said in an interview that the recordings can't really tell you just how beautiful Gigli's voice was live in the theater. Corelli said it was like an angel was singing and Gigli's mezza voce or falsetto could "fill the theater" and no one else had this. It was something unique to Gigli. The acting is in the VOICE - This is opera, and this is the problem with the crappy singers of today, who can act but not sing. (One critic, rather cruelly, once described Gigli's appearance on stage as resembling a peasant farmer following a plow.)

Born in 1890, Gigli came from an extremely poor family, and received his first education from the local monastery in Recanati, where he sang in the choir as a boy alto. He immediately began to attract attention because of the uncommon beauty of his voice. He was able to get a scholarship to study in Rome, at the Santa Cecilia school of music. He sang in an international contest in 1914 (concorso McCormick di Parma), where one of the judges, Alessandro Bonci, himself a brilliant belcanto tenor, famously exclaimed: "At last we have found THE tenor!"

They had indeed found THE tenor. Here is a real belcanto classic, from La Sonnambula: "Prendi, l'anel ti dono" (00:00). All the qualities characteristic of Gigli are there: the effortless, floating sound, the long phrases, the exquisite color, and the masterful use of pure head voice. Gigli had an almost invariable technique for singing a song or aria -- rarely moving out of head voice or falsetto, and then, typically, toward the end of a piece, pouring out the sound and making a climactic ending with a big high note. (This aria is an exception.) One can sing forever that way, and he did. He sang continuously from the time he was a child until he was over sixty.

A great part of Gigli's extraordinary popularity during his lifetime derived from the many films he made. Most of what we can see today of him singing is from the movies. Gigli did not do well outside the limits of melodic and sentimental Italian music. He sensed, however, a big opportunity in films, and this turned out to be a brilliant move on his part, for several reasons. First, it gave him a huge audience that would never have seen him in an opera house, and second, films were - curiously enough - often able to show his slight acting skills to advantage by the clever subterfuge of letting talented actors play off him, so that we look at audiences, love interests, dramatic complications, etc. while he is singing. This keeps our ear on him, and our eye on better actors. A good example is the film "Non Ti Scordar di Me." He sings the title song in front of a curtain (he portrays an opera singer in the film) while his beautiful love interest sits in the front row, weeping. We see much more of her, but we hear the unequaled voice of Gigli: "Non ti scordar di me" (11:04).

In spite of his penchant for movies and sentimental favorites, however, he did not abandon the operatic repertoire. Quite the contrary. He was everywhere renowned for his opera performances, both in person and on record. Here is what is clearly one of the best recordings ever of "TOSCA" (complete opera): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8jzVnJffqQ

http://grandivoci.jimdo.com/2013/01/05/beniamino-gigli-documenti/

-------------------------------------