When Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) started working on the opera Nabucco in the early 1840s, it was hard to foresee a promising career that would make him the most successful opera composer of all time. On the contrary: Verdi was already around 30 years old when he celebrated his breakthrough at Milan's La Scala with Nabucco, his private life had been hit hard by misfortune and he was on the verge of letting his composing pen disappear into his desk drawer forever due to a lack of success. Fortunately, he did not do so and became Italy's best-known and most popular opera composer.

The powerful Romanian tenor Ștefan Pop opens this recording with Questa o quella, and his subtle, penetrating and technically excellent voice is also evident in the other arias, which are imbued with passion.

The carefully curated collection of arias on this CD provides a musical cross-section of Verdi's compositional sophistication. Together with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille under the baton of Lawrence Foster, Ștefan Pop succeeds in impressively depicting the artistic maturation process of Verdi's middle creative phase in particular.

Tenor and Operalia prizewinner Stefan Pop studied at the Ghoerghe Dima Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca and won the Hariclea Darclee competition, the International Music Competition Seoul and the Oscar della Lirica Young Generation in 2019. Highlights of recent seasons include his role debut as Cavaradossi (Tosca) in London and Rodolfo (La Bohème) in Liège (Belgium) alongside Angela Gheorghiu. The Duke of Mantua (Rigoletto) in Taormina under the direction of Plácido Domingo and Jacopo (I due Foscari) in a new production in Parma.

Conductors with whom he has worked include Zubin Mehta, Fabio Luisi, Daniele Gatti, Michele Mariotti and Nello Santi. Stefan Pop has been an honorary citizen of his home town of Bistrita (Romania) since 2015.