Volver Plácido Domingo & Pablo Sáinz Villegas

• Álvaro Carrillo (1921 - 1969):
• 1 Sabor A Mí 03:12
• Guty Cárdenas (1905 - 1932):
• 2 Nunca 03:26
• Sergio Assad (1952 - ):
• 3 Valeria's Bossa 03:34
• Raul Ferrão (1850 - 1953):
• 4 Coimbra 02:45
• Tomás Barrera Saavedra (1870 - 1938):
• 5 Adios Granada 04:30
• Agustin Barrios Mangoré (1885 - 1944):
• 6 Una Limosna Por El Amor de Dios 04:30
• Carmelo Larrea (1907 - 1980):
• 7 Dos Cruces 05:01
• Carlos Castellano Gomez (1904 - 2002):
• 8 La Morena De Mi Copla 03:08
• José Fernández Diaz (1908 - 1979):
• 9 Guajira Guantanamera 02:55
• Carlos Eleta Almarán (1918 - 2013):
• 10 Historia De Un Amor 04:08
• Violeta Parra (1917 - 1967):
• 11 Gracias A La Vida 04:25
• Carlos Gardel (1890 - 1935):
• 12 Volver 03:57
• Total Runtime 45:31

Info for Volver

One of the most exciting and unusual musical encounters to have taken place in recent years: Plácido Domingo, world-renowned opera tenor, met Pablo Sáinz Villegas who Domingo hailed Villegas as, “The master of the guitar”. Upon meeting on stage in June 2016 at a benefit concert marking Domingo’s seventy-fifth birthday held in Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu Stadium before an audience of 80,000 enthusiastic spectators. The high point of this magical night of music was “Adiós Granada” from the one-act zarzuela Emigrantes by Tomás Barrera that dates from 1905. Afterwards Pablo Villegas spoke of the great energy and inspiration that he felt as a result of this encounter.

It was in that first concert, these two knew an album would flourish with sounds of Latin music from around the world. Volver, is the brainchild of Domingo and Villegas set for release on October 12, 2018 as a Sony Classical recording. Featuring famous Iberian and Latin America songs alongside three solo works for the guitar: “The Spanish Coplas”, “Nostalgic Fado”, and “Mexican Bolero”. The album includes pieces such as Violeta Parras’s Gracias a la vida, which was inducted into the Latin Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013, as well as Volver by Alfredo Le Pera, and Carlos Gardel and Álvaro Carrillo’s immensely successful Sabor a mí, which is now also on the list of songs included in the Latin Grammy Hall of Fame. These arrangements were prepared by twelve-time Grammy winner Rafa Sardina, resulting in exciting new versions that capture Plácido Domingo’s voice in a uniquely intimate way.

Domingo is recognized as one of the world’s greatest and most influential opera tenors. Crowned by Newsweek as “The King of Opera,” Domingo is an iconic musician who continues to reinvent himself and push boundaries in what is now the sixth decade of his career. Not only does his repertoire encompass more roles than held by any other tenor in the history of music—he recently performed his 150th role at the Salzburg Festival—he has also recorded more than 100 complete operas, amongst which are 12 Grammy Awards. In addition to 3,900 career performances, he has starred in three feature opera films, and in the telecast of Tosca, seen by more than one billion people in 117 countries. The New York Times helps contextualize Domingo’s career achievements by noting, “It’s as if Tom Brady were still winning Super Bowls in his 50s – while playing three sports at once.” But his lifelong commitment to the arts is far from being orthodox: he has, for instance, appeared as himself on Sesame Street and The Simpsons, and voiced roles in computer-animated films such as The Book of Life, an homage to the Mexican Day of the Dead festival. In 1993, he also founded the international voice competition Operalia, recognized throughout the business as the world’s most important platform for the discovery of new singers.

It is Mexico, to wit, the roots of his childhood, to which the star returns in the wake of his last two acclaimed albums Encanto del Mar and The Latin Album Collection. Born in Madrid to two zarzuela singers, he moved to Mexico City with his parents at the age of eight and remained to study piano and conducting.

Pablo Sáinz Villegas is debuting his first Sony Classical recording. The international press has hailed Villegas as “a global ambassador of the Spanish guitar” (Billboard Magazine) and praised Villegas “virtuosic playing characterized by its vividly shaded colors and his irresistible exuberance” (The New York Times). Villegas has even been compared to one of the greatest guitarists of the twentieth century, Andrés Segovia. Born in Logroño, Spain it was at the age of six when he began to play the guitar. Within a year, Villegas was performing and charming the audience as a young boy. Looking back on more than 30 international awards, including the Gold Medal at the Parkening International Guitar Competition. Villegas was the first guitarist to win the El Ojo Crítico, the highest honour awarded by Spanish critics in the field of classical music. Villegas now appears regularly in the world’s most famous concert halls, including New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.

Plácido Domingo, tenor
Pablo Sainz Villegas, classical guitar
Florida Philharmonic LLC Buenos Aires
Nazareno Andorno, conductor

Plácido Domingo
has appeared in 130 different roles, more than any other tenor in the annals of music, in a repertoire spanning the centuries from Mozart to Verdi, Berlioz to Puccini, and Wagner to Ginastera. He has sung at every important opera house in the world and made well over 100 acclaimed recordings, most of which are full-length operas, often recording the same role more than once. He has been seen in more than 50 opera videos and three feature opera films, and his telecast performance in Puccini’s Tosca, filmed at authentic Roman locations, was seen by more than a billion people in 117 countries.

Domingo has opened the Met season over 20 times, surpassing the old record set by Caruso. As a conductor he has led opera performances in all the important houses, from the Met to Covent Garden, from the Vienna State Opera to Los Angeles’s Music Center. He has also conducted symphonic concerts with such renowned ensembles as the Berliner and Wiener Philharmoniker, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London and Chicago Symphony orchestras, and made numerous recordings as a conductor. Domingo was music director of the Seville World’s Fair in 1992 and one of the founders of the Los Angeles Music Center Opera in 1984, remaining its music adviser and principal guest conductor until July 2000, when he became artistic director. In addition, he has been artistic director of Washington Opera since the 1996/97 season.

Plácido Domingo was born in 1941 in Madrid to parents who were zarzuela (Spanish operetta) performers and moved to Mexico when he was eight. After studying voice, piano and conducting at the Mexico City Conservatory he made his operatic debut at Monterrey as Alfredo in Verdi’s La Traviata and then spent two and a half years with the Israel National Opera, singing 280 performances of twelve different roles. In 1966 he created the title role of Ginastera’s Don Rodrigo in the American premiere at New York City Opera. His Metropolitan Opera debut came in 1968, as Maurizio in Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, and he has subsequently appeared there in more than 600 performances. Domingo also appears regularly at La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, Covent Garden, Opéra Paris-Bastille, San Francisco Opera, Chicago’s Lyric Opera, Washington Opera, Los Angeles Opera, the Liceu in Barcelona, Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Teatro Real in Madrid, and at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals.

Domingo’s repertoire not only includes virtually all the important French and Italian operas but also German roles such as Parsifal, Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, Siegmund in Die Walküre, Walther in Die Meistersinger, Erik in Der fliegende Holländer, The Emperor in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, Hüon in Weber’s Oberon and Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio. He has created the leading roles in Ginastera’s Don Rodrigo, Menotti’s Goya and Antón Garcia Abril’s Divinas Palabras, and during his 30th anniversary season at the Met he added Herman in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades to his repertoire, his 113th role and his first in Russian. In the 2004/05 season he added role 121, singing Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac for the first time at the Metropolitan, and role 122, recording the complete Tristan und Isolde. Highlights of his 2005/06 season included celebrating the 50th anniversary season of the Washington National Opera by conducting Verdi’s I vespri siciliani and singing five gala evenings. In 2006/07 he sang the Emperor in the world-premiere performance of Tan Dun’s The First Emperor at the Met, repeating it in the 2007/08 season during which he also added to his repertoire the role of Oreste in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride and conducted Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the New York house. In that season he also conducted Don Giovanni in Washington, La Bohème and Tosca in Los Angeles, and the world premiere of Howard Shore’s opera The Fly at the Théâtre du Chatelet in Paris, which he brought to Los Angeles Opera in 2008. During the 2009/10 season he added to his repertoire the title role of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra – one of the most demanding of all baritone parts – with performances at the Met, Berlin’s Staatsoper, La Scala, Covent Garden, and Madrid’s Teatro Real.

Plácido Domingo was the first classical artist to give a solo concert in New York’s Central Park, and his collaboration with his colleagues Luciano Pavarotti and José Carreras, “The Three Tenors”, has been heard in concert all over the globe. His interest in helping young singers led him in 1993 to establish the annual competition “Operalia”. Domingo has raised millions of dollars through benefit concerts on behalf of the victims of the 1985 Mexican earthquake, AIDS and such other disasters as the Armenian earthquake, the mudslides of Acapulco, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where the stage of the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts was named for him. His countless awards and distinctions include the US Medal of Freedom, an honorary Knighthood of the British Empire, Commander of France’s Légion d’Honneur, recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors, an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, former Russian President Gorbachev’s World Award for Humanitarian Causes, in 2009 the first Birgit Nilsson Prize for musical excellence, and, in 2010, The Latin Recording Academy®’s “Person of the Year” award for his philanthropic and personal achievements.

Plácido Domingo has recorded with Deutsche Grammophon for 40 years. His discography includes not only the operas of Bizet, Donizetti, Giordano, Leoncavallo, Massenet, Mascagni, Mozart, Offenbach, Puccini, Saint-Saëns, Verdi and Wagner, but also French and Italian arias, lieder, tangos and an album of songs and duets based on poems by Pope John Paul II. In 2010, Deutsche Grammophon released Domingo’s two new recordings of rarities by Leoncavallo: the vocal-symphonic poem for tenor and orchestra La Nuit de mai and the opera I Medici, in which he sings the leading role created by Verdi’s first Otello. 2011 will see the release of a new recording of Giordano’s Fedora, in which Domingo co-stars with Angela Gheorghiu. On 21 January 2011 Domingo reaches his 70th birthday. His many career highlights will be celebrated by presenting newly mastered selections from four decades of Deutsche Grammophon and Decca recordings in the Limited Editions The Plácido Domingo Story and 13 complete operas in Plácido Domingo - The Opera Collection. In addition, Viva Madrid, a new anthology of zarzuela music featuring Domingo, will be released internationally.

Booklet for Volver