Ciro Amato

Naples, Italy · b. 1996 · FARA Records

Ciro Amato (b. 8 April 1996) is a baritone from Naples. He sings LUCA in L'Ultima Fiamma, and his aria — “Portami dove sei” — is three verses long, sung almost without voice, and is the truest thing anyone says in the opera.

Neapolitan, and everything that implies against a Milanese tenor: the loud, warm, working south rather than the cold, immaculate north. Naples is a city where singing is not a profession but a condition, and he learned to sing there long before anyone told him it was an art form. The son of people who made things with their hands, and it never left him — he is the only one of the three principals who looks like he could actually cut the stone, and the role was written for exactly that. Neapolitan canzone first, opera late and slightly reluctantly; he still sings as if telling you something rather than performing it.

A dark, warm, rough-edged Neapolitan baritone, a fifth below the tenor — and the whole drama of the opera is in that interval. Low, close, unpolished and human, almost spoken, with grit in it that the score wants and does not correct. His aria is marked pianissimo from the first note to the last: the silence is the strength. His instrument in the orchestration is the solo cello, which the score assigns to grief.

Patient, watchful, unasking. He is the only character who never asks Elena for anything — only that she know she exists.