Aria: Luka Faulisi, Itamar Golan

For his debut on Sony Classical, violinist Luka Faulisi takes us into the “world of dreams” that is Romantic opera. Among the operatic jewels are Franz Waxman’s Carmen Fantasy, Henryk Wieniawski’s Fantasy on Themes from Gounod’s Faust, Leopold Auer’s arrangement of Lensky’s Aria from Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin, and Fausili’s own version of Violetta’s glittering aria Sempre libera from Verdi’s La Traviata. Faulisi grew up near the Opéra Bastille in Paris and would often wait in line for autographs after seeing performances. “Opera inhabits an ideal world of myth with its mixture of theater, poetry, music, and magnificent places,” says the Italian-French-Serbian violinist. “Storytelling and the sensitivity of the human voices are at the heart of the album.”