According to his own account, Spyres was trained first as a baritone, then as a tenor, the latter course enabling his successful “first career” as one of the most accomplished of contemporary tenors navigating the high-extension, high-agility waters. Now, he proposes bringing his baritone self back into the picture without relinquishing his high-tenor one. And although he wishes to accomplish this without creating a dysfunctional discontinuity between the two, or even the sort of “high passaggio” transition of the pre-Duprez tenors, this ambition is not quite the same as trying to alchemically combine them into a long-range version of a “real tenor” or “real baritone” voice, of either the dark/plump/loose or the bright/lean/taut variety—or, best of all, on the midline between them. Not only that: he comes close to asserting, and backing up, the notion that his version of “baritenor” can effect just that alchemy twice over, taking on not only the coloratura doings of pre-Romantic roles of tweener tessitura (particularly, Rossini’s), or even their coupling with stratospheric capers by Donizetti and Adam, but roles that belong to our modern tenor and baritone categories, and singing them not in serial career stages, but all at once. And allow me to stipulate: on the recording, he comes not only closer to demonstrating that than anyone else I’m aware of (who else has tried?), but closer than I would have thought possible. A list is just a list, and a recording just a recording, but this recording is an unusual achievement.

Most of the disc is, at the least, enjoyable. At the high end, Spyres brings a bright spirit to the Fille du Régiment aria and Adam’s Postillon fable, nailing the repeated Cs of the former with ease and negotiating the lie of the latter. Ds, though, are not as persuasive. Both in the Postillon song and with an interpolation in the (Rossini) Otello excerpt, they betray a hint of the squeal heard in the Met Idomeneo (he settles for a less ambitious choice on the recorded “Fuor del mar“). And apart from the conceded capability in terms of vocal mechanics, we are entitled to ask what sort of sound we’d find satisfying at these heights in the light of the classical ideal of an aesthetic and functional continuity throughout a given voice’s compass. Relative to past exemplars, Spyres’ is a headier, rather wide-set adjustment, not detached from the two octaves below it, but also not proceeding logically from the upper ranges of any of our “real” lyric tenor models (Rosvänge, Pavarotti, Gedda, to cite three who recorded one or the other of these pieces, or Kraus, whose voice had the same reach), or from his own baritone vocality, which governs the lower two-thirds of even his extended range. It avoids constriction, is not “spread” in the negative sense and has a nice feel of release, but no true ring. For a C that has both release and ring, that does emerge without manipulation from all that leads up to it, and that is a stylistic and attitudinal fit with the Fille and Postillon arias, listen again to “Au Mont Ida” from Offenbach’s La belle Hélène, as sung (in Swedish) by Jussi Björling in his early prime. Of course, he wasn’t trying to be a baritenor.