Singing sensation tenor Freddie De Tommaso makes his high-flying Sydney debut

There are plenty of reasons why British Italian tenor Freddie De Tommaso has become an overnight sensation, now we find out why.

British Italian tenor Freddie De Tommaso made his Australian debut in the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House.

• Top-notch cast brings sheer joy to opera favourite
• The sound of silence brings house down
• Stunning homecoming for star Aussie soprano
• Wait was worth it for opera with everything

Every so often a tenor comes along who cannot be mentioned without being compared to the great operatic deities Enrico Caruso or Lucian Pavarotti. In the 2010s it was German superstar Jonas Kaufmann, now is the turn of young British Italian up and comer Freddie De Tommaso.

Born in Tunbridge Wells in southeast England, the son of an Italian restaurateur and an English mother, he studied at London’s Royal Academy of Music and got his break in 2021 when he jumped in as Cavaradossi in Royal Opera’s production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca after the lead took sick in the first act.

A contract with prestige record label Decca followed and after two chart-topping albums, Passione and Il Tenore, he became an overnight sensation with his version of the mother of all arias Nessun dorma clocking up more than a million streams. Now he is making his much anticipated Australian debut with two recitals for Opera Australia, one in Sydney and the other in Melbourne.

Accompanied by OA staff pianist Kate Johnson in front of an eye-catching semicircular set with an artwork of a giant icon of the Virgin superimposed on an upward view of a cathedral dome, the Sydney concert played to a packed house and over its two hours it did not disappoint as De Tommaso worked his way through a program of Neapolitan favourites and landmark arias by Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, Umberto Giordano, Amilcare Ponchielli and Vincenzo Bellini.

It was not only the thrilling high notes that raised the hairs on your neck, and there were plenty of those, but the heartbreaking sotto voce endings of Francesco Paolo Tosti’s love songs Non t’amo piu and Ideale which left the listener in awe and grasping for their tissues.

Like all good singers De Tommaso inhabits his material, conveying an intense psychodrama over a matter of minutes. The voice is pure gold, even, rounded and exciting across the range and with suggestions of darker tones and dramatic depth for, like Kaufmann, he started life as a baritone.

To close the first half De Tommaso called on his wife, London-based Australian soprano Alexandra Oomens – who is currently appearing in OA’s production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte – to join him in the Cherry Duet from Pietro Mascagni’s opera L’amico Fritz. The chemistry – both musical and physical – was evident from these two singers who met when they were studying at London’s Royal Academy of Music.

There was also fine chemistry between the singer and Johnson with the Steinway filling in for an orchestra on several of the songs, summoning some fine mandolin effects and swelling fanfares.

The audience were not going to allow De Tommaso to leave without an encore and he obliged with his first non-Italian number, the Caruso favourite Sir Arthur Sullivan’s The Lost Chord.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Freddie De Tommaso: Il Tenore in Concert

• WHERE Joan Sutherland Theatre Sydney Opera House

• WHEN August 11, 2024