The next Caruso

Telegraph

02-04-2025

'People think it's old fashioned, to see a tenor 'playing to the gallery',' says Freddie De Tommaso. 'But showmanship is important when the public has paid to be entertained. When you hit those big, high notes you want eyes popping, jaws dropping. You want them thinking: he's still going, he's still going!' He grins. 'The critics who say that's 'unmusical', that you're 'asking for applause?' No! You're doing your job as an entertainer.'
Not that critics would ever call De Tommaso unmusical. The 32-year-old Italian restaurateur's son from Tunbridge Wells has been universally feted as an 'ardent', 'thrilling' and 'bombshell-voiced' performer since winning first prize at the 2018 Tenor Viñas International Singing Competition in Barcelona. 'He sounds like a youthful Italian Domingo with a gorgeous baritonal quality to the lower end, building up to a heart-rending top,' trilled Opera Now.
His fame soared when, in 2021, he stepped in at the last minute to perform the role of Mario Cavaradossi in Puccini's Tosca at the Royal Opera House after the scheduled singer was taken ill. 'British tenor saves night at the opera!' trumpeted the Daily Mail. That year he signed to Decca records and released his debut album, Passione, on which he paid homage to the great, early 20th-century Italian tenors he loves: Mario Lanza, Franco Corelli, Giuseppe Di Stefano and the man he calls the 'father of all modern tenors, Enrico Caruso'.
As he arrives at the Royal Opera House in a waft of aftershave and tosses aside his leather jacket, it's uncanny how much De Tommaso physically resembles a singer from the Carusonian age. He's got a vintage strongman's inverted triangle build. The handshake is a meaty sparkler – gold pinkie ring, bracelet and rose-gold Rolex. 'I must have been a magpie in a past life, I love shiny stuff!' he says, a boyish grin brightening his ruddy, earnest face and raising his hooped jet brows. There's no liquorice-curled tache today although he's sported one in the past.
'I am old school,' he nods. 'People call my singing old fashioned all the time – sometimes with a negative connotation. But I think the old style of singing is much, much better.' He's proud to embrace the romantic, Southern Italian intensity audiences enjoyed 'when opera was the pop music of the day, the man on the street bought arias as vinyl singles.' Now, he sighs 'opera has become this elitist niche thing, until the World Cup comes around and all sorts of people crank up ole Pav singing Nessun dorma,' he shakes his head. 'That's just an aria and not even the best one in the canon. Anybody who hums along to that would probably enjoy coming along to Rigoletto or Carmen which is packed with tunes they'll know…' It irks him that there is virtually no opera on British television. 'Such a shame. It's like the whole world is dumbing down.'
De Tomasso is preparing for his role as Don José in this season's ROH production of Carmen today. In Damiano Michieletto's staging, the action takes place in small town Spain in the 1970s, with the heroine strutting her stuff disco-style and the khaki of Don José's uniform (he's in the police, not the army now) echoed by the dried tufts of grass sprouting from the stage.
Since Bizet's opera has been performed around the world since 1875, I hope it's no spoiler to say that Carmen ends with Don José killing its heroine in a fit of jealous rage. A heightened awareness of femicide around the world means there has been some debate about opera houses continuing to mount productions of Bizet's opera. Add to that, the 'toxic' internet culture inspiring misogyny in young boys as dramatised in Netflix's recent hit drama, Adolescence.
De Tommaso has no time for 'cancelling' operas like Carmen. 'It's just a story!' he says. 'But this production does lean into the fact Don José is not a nice bloke. He has all this backstory of having killed somebody, having to go into the police force instead of prison.' This production also highlights Don José's 'complicated' relationship with his mother. De Tommaso adopts a puppyish whine to explain how that's usually played: 'Oooh, I love her and wish I could see her!' He makes a face. 'This production shows that relationship as strained to the extreme, with Don José's mother incredibly overbearing and controlling.' And that feeds into the character's battle for control with Carmen? 'I suppose so, yeah,' he nods. And the key thing is that it's clear Carmen doesn't 'deserve' what happens to her? 'Nobody deserves that!' he shudders. 'Carmen doesn't do anything wrong at all. She just tells Don José: this is over, I'm going with this nice bullfighter now and he doesn't take that very well.'
Drama actually came ahead of singing for the young De Tommaso who won a scholarship to the private Tonbridge School in Kent at the age of 11. 'I did drama clubs before that and my first leading role was Mowgli in the Jungle Book when I was nine,' he says. 'My mum likes to joke that I was a 'very well nourished Mowgli'. I wasn't scrawny!'
He inherited his 'performer's spirit' from his Puglian-born father, Franco: a 'bon viveur and big character' and chef patron of the popular Italian restaurant, Signor Franco, in Tunbridge Wells. 'It was quite an old school, Italian fine dining place – thick table cloths and Pavarotti on the sound system,' he says. 'We only ever ate there ourselves on special occasions and I started working there from the age of 16. Otherwise, as my two younger brothers will attest, we saw very little of our dad because running that place was a 365-day-a-year job.'
Franco De Tommaso died when his eldest son was just 18. 'Your father dies when you're just starting out in life? Well, it's not great is it.' Freddie went off to Bristol University to study French and Italian but dropped out after a year and a half. 'I wasn't getting enough out of it,' he says, 'and felt I was wasting time and money. But I'd never have quit if my dad hadn't died because he was quite strict. If he hadn't died I would never have set out on the path to becoming a singer.'
Having failed to get into the choir at university – 'I assumed my voice was good enough for school but not good enough for the next level' – De Tommaso went home and worked at Signor Franco. It was only as 'a bit of fun, to fill the time between lunch and dinner service' that he decided to take some lessons from his old singing teacher 'who said: hang on, your voice is much better, in fact I think it might really be quite good…' He went on to spend five years at the Royal Academy of Music, initially as a baritone before teachers discovered his tenor range – 'like opening a series of doors into new notes' – where he first began performing the role of Don José.
De Tommaso enjoys fast cars, expensive watches and good red wines: 'all the boys toys'. He married Australian soprano Alexandra Oomens and says she's an incredible chef so the pair might open a restaurant one day. They live in Berlin so in London he's staying with one of his brothers and was delighted to find there's a Brazilian deli around the corner where they slice meat from a skewer.
As a singer he says he's 'very low maintenance compared to a lot of singers. Some are completely nuts,' he confides. 'They won't speak for 24 hours before a performance – completely ridiculous.' De Tommaso says his regime involves 'a trip to the gym in the morning if I've slept well. I eat a good lunch: steak, a lot of protein with broccoli and loads of fluids. I like those Vocalzone throat pastilles and my Olbas inhaler in the afternoon. After a performance I'm knackered so I have a few pints with a meal and go to bed at 11pm.'
Although he has the odd nightmare about stepping on stage into the wrong opera, nothing in his real life makes him nervous. Later this year he'll be appearing opposite the world's greatest soprano, the Russian Anna Netrebko in a new production of Tosca at Covent Garden. She's a bona fide diva, shunned in the west for refusing to denounce Putin, and at 53, has over two decades on him. But he's not intimidated. 'Because I started in this spinto tenor range at such a young age I'm used to having a big age gap with my soprano.'
His only sadness is that his dad is not able to enjoy his success. 'Because he would have loved all this. The travel, the shows, the seats in the front row.' He sighs and rallies. 'It means I'm all the more determined to enjoy every moment for us both.'