[1] Ruggiero Leoncavallo - Prologue from "Pagliazzi"

[2] Giacomo Puccini - Scarpia's Te Deum from "Tosca"

[3] Giuseppe Verdi - Iago's Credo from Act II of "Othello"

[4] Sergei Rachmaninov - Aleko's Cavatina from "Aleko"

[5] Alexander Borodin - Prince Igor's arie from "Prince Igor"

[6] Richard Wagner - Wolfram's Song to a star from "Tannhäuser"

[7] Richard Wagner - The Dutchman's monolog from "Der Fliegende Hollander"

[8] George Bizet - Torreador's couplets from "Carmen"

This recording presents Zbigniew Macias as a performer of the most characteristic and varied opera characters, the artistic creations revealing the full range of his technical mastery and stage temperament.

The prologue from Pagliacci by Ruggiero Leoncavallo is not an easy monologue: the singer has not only to prove his technical skills here, but also he must resist the temp-tation of being too pushy or too realistic; the dramatic expression resulting directly from the text itself and the phrasing. It is a true test of the good artistic taste of the performer.

The Te Deum, the final part in Act I of Giacomo Puccini's Tosca is equally demanding for the artist. It is in that scene that the despotism, possessiveness and the meanness of the cruel Baron Scarpia, who made the whole of Rome shiver, to quote Tosca's expression from Act II, is revealed for the first time. The Te Deum is also a fascinating musical construction, a proof of the composer's exceptional feeling for the stage and his skill in building extreme tension by the use of simple musical means. The human voice is of major importance here.

The third of the gallery of villains presented on this record is Iago, the great antagonist of Shakespeare's Othello. The famous Credo - a passionate confession of the desire for revenge - is one of the most famous monologues ever created for an opera. The intensity of expression, the distillation of love and hate with uncommon music by Giuseppe Verdi gives Iago even more power than his counterpart in Shakespeare's play.

To the category of noble and, to some extent at least, unhappy protagonists, belongs Prince Igor; the title character of Alexander Borodin's opera. His famous aria -one of the most popular in the classical Russian repertoire - demands that the singer use broad, effusive, truly Slavonic phrasing, so different from typically Italian bel canto.

Although Aleco, the juvenile opera by Sergei Rachmaninov is rarely included in the repertoire of opera houses, the popular aria by the title character is a "stock item" for every baritone singer. The romantic quality and rich melodiousness character of Slav music is further enriched here with the unique colouration always present in Rachmaninov's works. It is the phenomenal idiom of Russian music, combining many entirely different elements resulting from the geographical extent of that country. Along with Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Rachmaninov is the composer whose music is in the most clear and at the same time most natural way, intertwined with the sophisticated colouring of the East.

An entirely different type of romantic expression is represented by two characters from earlier masterpieces of Richard Wagner. The Dutchman, mysterious and tragic, endlessly wandering the wild seas in his search for ideal love and the immortal symbol of eternal femininity, is a deeply introvert person, experiencing his irresoluteness alone, even if violent moods are not entirely alien to him. The Dutchman's monologue of remarkable beauty from the first Wagner's unquestionable masterpieces shows the character in one of those moments of great spiritual vehemence and emotional tension.

Wolfram von Eschenbach is a stage incarnation of a real character extremely important for German culture, probably the earliest of the three great epics living from the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth century, a great poet and a eulogist of love. In Wagner's opera he stays in the shadow of the main character, Tannhauser, he remains nevertheless a permanent element of the specific drama of the opera, where history becomes one with the excessively rich, romantic imagination of the Bayreuth master. Song to a Star performed by Wolfram in the last act of the opera is at the same time a typical example of Wagner's melodic style, and also an embodiment of the type of musical narration already fading away in the composer's imagination built with the help of such traditional structures as arias.

And finally the last expressive - and least problematic - male character on the recording: Escamillo, the toreador of G. Bizet's Carmen. A typical seducer, he wins women's hearts unscrupulously. Even the beautiful Gypsy, Carmen, most cunning and sophisticated in the game of love, has to surrender. Escamillo's couplets are typical encore material, the kind of music that affects the imagination and emotions of the widest audiences. Its simplicity gives rise to doubts, but it is only seemingly simple! Bizet's melody in fact never exceeds the limits beyond which there is only shallowness or even trash. The masterful skill of balancing on that delimiting line is a feature characteristic of many representatives of French culture.

Wiktor A. Brégy