Carlo Vistoli, countertenor, and Guilio Zappa, piano, perform a recital in the Board of Officer’s Room at the Park Avenue Armory on September 9, 2026. Photo credit: Stephanie Berger

Before he made his North American recital debut at the Park Avenue Armory’s Board of Officers Room last Thursday, Carlo Vistoli hadn’t appeared in New York City since 2017 despite his being one of the world’s most in-demand countertenors. In an extraordinarily varied program partnered by the fine pianist Giulio Zappa and featuring music by composers from Henry Purcell to Leonard Bernstein, Vistoli deployed a healthy, handsome instrument that seamlessly soared from rich alto lows to thrilling soprano highs.

Vistoli’s first appeared locally in 2015 as a member of the seventh edition of Jardin des Voix, Les Arts Florissants’s celebrated young artist program. Like Lea Desandre, a fellow member of that edition, Vistoli continues to collaborate with LAF: Just last year, they released Nei Giardini d’amore, a CD featuring him and fellow countertenor Hugh Cutting in an bewitching collection of Italian cantatas and duets.

Two years later, Vistoli returned to Alice Tully Hall as part of John Eliot Gardiner’s worldwide Monteverdi450 tour in which the conductor led semi-staged versions of all three of the great composer’s extant operas. I attended both Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria and L’Incoronazione di Poppea; Vistoli particularly stood out in the latter as a love-sick Ottone.

Since then, he’s been featured in a dizzying number of the most prestigious European baroque opera revivals including appearing both in concert and on stage as Giulio Cesare to Cecilia Bartoli’s Cleopatra. After a 2020 revival of Christopher Alden’s well-traveled production of Handel’s Partenope at the San Francisco Opera was postponed, it finally arrived in 2024 with Vistoli as Arsace, an acclaimed portrayal which won him the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Emerging Stars Competition.

Although he appeared in the dual roles of Berengario da Arundel and Adelmo da Otranto in last year’s world premiere of Francesco Filidei’s Il nome della rosa at La Scala, Vistoli’s career has focused almost exclusively on 17^th and 18^th century music. So one might have expected his Armory recital to prioritize that repertoire, but it didn’t. True, he began with a glowing pair of Purcell arrangements by Benjamin Britten, followed by an exquisitely slow “Care selve” from Handel’s Atalanta in which he showed off a seemingly effortless, real trill, so unlike the vague shakes to which so many baroque performers resort. While it was a bit odd to hear Jupiter’s “Where’er you walk” sung by a countertenor (and Vistoli has recorded Semele’s Athamas), his delightfully airy rendition made up for any disappointment that he didn’t include a Handelian coloratura showpiece.

The first half of the recital closed with a pair of “standards” by Schubert. He vividly differentiated the two voices of “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (more successfully, I might add, than Lise Davidsen had at Carnegie Hall in June) and he and Zappa found just the right lilting tempo for Der Schwanengesang’s evergreen “Ständchen.”

A trio of songs by bel canto’s greatest exponents opened second half. An intoxicatingly lovely “Vaga luna, che inargenti” by Bellini struck me as a perfect sample to share with those who claim to hate all countertenors. Rossini followed: “La legende de Marguerite”, which is the same tune as Cenerentola’s wistful “Una volta c’era un re” and was sung with plangent earnestness and subtly differentiated verses. Donizetti’s “Me voglio fa’ ‘na casa” served as a rousing close to the set.

I haven’t generally been a big fan of countertenors diving into 19^th and early 20^th century music, but Vistoli’s warmly even and wide-ranging voice combined with his unusually sensitive deployment of dynamic variation won me over where, for example, David Daniels’s Les Nuits d’été or Philippe Jaroussky’s excursions into Schubert or Hahn had not.

Carlo Vistoli, countertenor, and Guilio Zappa, piano, perform a recital in the Board of Officer’s Room at the Park Avenue Armory on September 9, 2026. Photo credit: Stephanie Berger

Vistoli too turned to Hahn for Venezia, a three-song cycle in Italian. The standout was “La biondina in gongoletta” in which again the singer dotted the multiple verses with lightly illuminating touches. His final two offerings likely surprised many: “Jeanie with the light brown hair” by Stephen Foster and “Somewhere” from West Side Story. The languorous Foster once more manifested Vistoli’s beguiling legato, while the Bernstein was offered as a heartfelt nod to the 25^th anniversary of 9/11 on the following day.

Four generous encores followed including three opera arias. Vistoli shared that early last year he performed Ruggiero in Alcina in Rome in a production by Pierre Audi, the Armory’s Artistic Director until his death in May 2025. Audi invited the singer to perform once again in New York and the achingly simple “Verdi prati” proved a fine tribute. Next, we were reminded of Vistoli’s triumph earlier this year again at the Rome Opera in the title role of Rossini’s Tancredi with a charming “Di tanti palpiti.” He has frequently performed Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice of late, and an unusually brisk “Che farò” followed before he ended the evening with beautifully spun-out “Ninna Nanna romagnola,” a traditional lullaby from his native Emilia-Romagna.

I had thought that the Gardiner Monteverdi was the last time I’d seen Vistoli before his Armory appearance, but then I remembered he was Farnace in Mozart’s Mitridate, Re di Ponto at the Berlin Staatsoper in November 2023. While I still prefer a ballsy mezzo in that role, he sang it with dashingly flamboyant vigor.

For sale outside the Board of Officers Room were copies of Vistoli’s just-released CD dedicated to rare arias Handel composed (or recomposed) for Italian castrati when they appeared in his English oratorios—a fascinating collection.

The remaining vocal recitals of the 2026 season at the Armory include Ben Bliss next month and Deepa Johnny in November.