Opera stars Michael Spyres and Lawrence Brownlee battle at the Mann in a tenor sing-off | Review

The two operatic tenors didn’t exactly put up their dukes in their vocally competitive duet from Rossini’s Otello. But the gesture was more than implied by Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres Thursday at the Mann Center in “An Evening of Vocal Fireworks: Amici e Rivali,” presented by Opera Philadelphia.

The program followed on the coattails of the duo’s Erato-label album Amici e Rivali (Friends and Rivals) that is getting best-of-the-year acclaim, though Thursday’s concert went beyond the album’s scope with a larger range of repertoire featuring Opera Philadelphia’s chorus as well as orchestra in good form under Corrado Rovaris. Solo arias were mixed in with the kind of high-wire duets that the Three Tenors wouldn’t go near. Pop-ish encores included the Mario Lanza standard “Be My Love” — all adding up to a great evening of sweaty singing, and one that made amends for the company’s disappointingly truncated Tosca last spring.

Brownlee, 48, and Spyres, 41, are well-matched because, well, they aren’t: Both made their careers on super-virtuosic repertoire, but while Brownlee’s voice maintains a lightness, Spyres has deeper range that allowed him to sing baritone excerpts from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet. Visually, the physically-compact Brownlee would hold his high notes for extra nanoseconds followed by a pinpoint accurate cadenza — while the taller, rumpled Spyres cracked a smile before hurling his beefier voice down the same path.

They both sang better on Thursday than on the album, whose starting point was a 2018 rogue concert video with questionable sound quality that documented their performance of “Ah vieni, nel tuo sangue” from Rossini’s Otello — beginning with Brownlee making the sign of the cross and ending with Spyres falling to his knees. It justifiably went viral.

Brownlee then raised the money for the Amici e Rivali album — also utilizing Rovaris, who knows how much rarely-heard items such as “Donala a questo core” from Rossini’s Ricciardo e Zoraide thrive on exactitude and speed. This is music whose rhetoric isn’t expressed in weighty operatic declamation but in decorated vocal lines that are primarily about visceral impact, yet leaving plenty of room for the singer’s personality.

Spyres turned into a man of a dozen voices — all comically inventive — in “Largo al factotum” from Rossini’s Barber. Brownlee found deeper elemental emotions while spinning a long legato line in “Asile héréditaire…Amis, amis secondez ma vengeance” from Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, but also scaled the music’s built-in encores as the composer reiterated the climatic moments. Near the concert’s end, the Otello standoff (heard in their original video) prompted gasps at the vocalism and smiles at their chemistry.

Might this pairing of singers turn into a phenomenon?