Recently in Reviews
21 Feb 2007
Carmen was one of Victoria de los Angeles’ favorite roles and she brought to it much that we
hear on this recording of French songs: a winsome voice without heavy vibrato, a close attention to musical detail, and an evident understanding of the French words that she conveys, if not with an impeccable accent, at least with a convincingly understandable pronunciation. »
20 Feb 2007
Yes, the German title must be employed for this filmed Nozze en Deutsch from 1967. »
20 Feb 2007
Recorded on 28 March 1970 in Rome, this recording of Parsifal makes available a live
performance conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch, one of the foremost interpreters of Wagner’s works in his day. »
18 Feb 2007
Franz Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words is well known, both as a familiar part of modern Lenten devotions and also as something of a stylistic oddity, I suspect. »
18 Feb 2007
From the 2005 season of the “reborn” La Fenice comes this Dynamic DVD of Wagner’s Parsifal. »
18 Feb 2007
Friday night in Leeds, in the North of England, at the city’s marvellously restored Grand Theatre, with the pavements outside shining wet and a tidal wave of umbrellas surging past, was an
exciting place to be. »
16 Feb 2007
In dedicating much of his creative life to the Thomaskirche, the German musician Günther
Ramin left his mark on the musical life of Leipzig, and his legacy includes a fine recording of
Johannes Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45. »
16 Feb 2007
Perhaps the best-known of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies, the Fourth also benefits from a
number of fine recordings. »
16 Feb 2007
The Opera Lafayette of Washington DC has been engaged in a new project this season – the Armide Project, as the group dubbed its ambitious plan, in collaboration with the University of Maryland Opera Studio, to present two great operas set to the same celebrated Philippe Quinault libretto. »
14 Feb 2007
Giovanni Battista Sammartini (c.1700-1775) belongs to that shadowy generation of Italian composers who no longer composed in the high Baroque style, but had adopted the clarity, simplicity and regularity that would serve as the building blocks for the Viennese masters of the late eighteenth century, and thus were tagged with the rather pejorative label “pre-classic” (a plague on all those music historians who can only see musical style in terms of progress leading to their particular figure of veneration!). »
13 Feb 2007
The great American opera? Ricky Ian Gordon’s “Grapes of Wrath” might be it. »
09 Feb 2007
An expressionist portrait of the Roman she-wolf was the first, striking image of this production, originally devised for Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, by the fashionable British director David McVicar. »
09 Feb 2007
The duo of gambist Vittorio Ghielmi and lutenist Luca Pianca even has its own domain name
(www.pianca-ghielmi.com), as well as several previous releases, of which the first has perhaps my favorite CD title ever (Bagpipes from Hell). »
09 Feb 2007
The English, though fundamental to the early music revival of the last half-century, have been rather remiss in exploring their native music dating from after the death of Purcell, and particularly that produced after the death of Handel. »
08 Feb 2007
Sorry my friends, but this rich-looking DVD has a feature that disqualifies it for me. »
08 Feb 2007
A literary critic once recalled the day when a German could not clear his throat “without finding pithy precedent in Goethe.” »
08 Feb 2007
In opera, Rossini, born in 1892- the year after Mozart died, is the successor of the great master
and, when performed as perceptively as in the “Cenerentola” that debuted at the Houston Grand Opera on January 27, his rightful heir. »
07 Feb 2007
During any recital by an aging divo there comes a moment of truth when he sings an operatic aria
(usually E lucevan le stelle , as the highest note is an A). That is the defining moment when he no longer can hide behind idiosyncratic interpretation, expressive breathing and a lot of clever transpositions. »
07 Feb 2007
This disc is a reissue of a 1993 recording made at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, California, but new to me. »
06 Feb 2007
I suppose you will find this quite an addition to the Melchior legacy if you are a collector of every sound Melchior ever uttered. »
06 Feb 2007
The Kirov Opera and Orchestra concluded their annual residency at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC last week with a Sunday matinee concert performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1932 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District. »
06 Feb 2007
Neither of these late works (the Judicium Salomonis is from 1702) is new to disc – the former
has two recent recordings, from ten and from twenty years ago, and the latter one, by Herreweghe, released in 1985. »
06 Feb 2007
The title Walewska i przjaciele, “Walewska and friends,” reflects the intention of the mezzo soprano Małgorzata Walewska, one of the foremost contemporary Polish singers to present herself and some of her colleagues in recording of various kinds of music. »
05 Feb 2007
Why do some conductors make it and others don’t? »
28 Jan 2007
Rossini’s last Italian opera, staged in 1825 as a part of Charles X’s coronation festivities, is a bizarre creation — a sassy little farce capped with a coronation cantata in the best traditions of staged court entertainment, from 16th-century Italian intermedi through their Baroque and Classic operatic progeny. »
28 Jan 2007
While many associate it with traditional music, the Salzburg Festival is also a venue for new
productions and, to a degree, new compositions. »
28 Jan 2007
The reason for being of this set is Gruberova’s wish to record as much as possible of her repertory (on her own label as most of the majors were either not interested in recording belcanto operas or had their own stars like Decca’s Joan Sutherland). »
28 Jan 2007
Who is the potential consumer for this DVD release of a 1953 Italian film version of Verdi's Aida, featuring Sophia Loren's stunning physical presence and Renata Tebaldi's stunning vocalism in the title role? »
24 Jan 2007
Let it be said at the outset that, at least to my eyes, the packaging and marketing of this DVD is
somewhat misleading. »
24 Jan 2007
A welcome addition to the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s own line of releases, this CD is a compilation of two works by Gustav Mahler that the late Klaus Tennstedt performed with the ensemble and which have not been issued previously. »
24 Jan 2007
I saw my first Káťa 37 years ago during the Flanders Festival. At the time it was still an almost complete novelty on the scene and the Czech company performed it according to the composer’s intentions. »
23 Jan 2007
Sébastien de Brossard (1655-1730) was, until recently, known to the musical world (if he was known at all) as a lexicographer (he prepared the first French musical dictionary, published in 1703) and collector, whose collection went entire, together with a catalogue he prepared, to the National Library in Paris, something which must have been almost unheard of in early eighteenth-century Europe, though commonplace today (imagine if Bach had managed to do the same with his scores!). »
23 Jan 2007
There are three reasons often cited for the paucity of performances of Rossini’s Otello: the horrible hack job of the Shakespearean drama by librettist Francesco Maria Berio, the difficulties in casting an opera requiring at least three top-rate tenor voices, and comparisons with Verdi’s popular opera of the same title. »
23 Jan 2007
True to the title of this collection, the present volume of correspondence edited by Henry-Louis de La Grange and Günther Weiss — here translated, revised , and supplemented by Antony Beaumont — offers, to date, the most complete body of letters of Gustav Mahler to his wife Alma. »
21 Jan 2007
The sleeve notes of this interesting issue state that “ any comparison between La Fattucchiera and Italian bel canto models by Bellini or Donizetti would be too easy though it became commonplace to describe him (= Cuyàs) as the continuator of the school of Bellini. »
21 Jan 2007
Although the name of Vicente Martin y Soler is no longer obscure, most opera lovers still know him best due to Mozart quoting his opera ‘Una cosa rara’ during the Don’s last meal in Don Giovanni. »
21 Jan 2007
I was impressed by Karajan’s intense conducting, which seems so right in the wake of the unavoidable tragedy that is going to happen. »
21 Jan 2007
Record companies are dominated by accountants and short term cost structure seems to be more important than artistic results or even sale figures. This is a prime example. »
21 Jan 2007
For those OperaToday readers prone to fantasies about being a member of royalty with one's own cozy opera house tucked away on the hereditary estate, this Hungaroton DVD will enable that desire. Filmed in August 2005 at the royal palace at Gödölló, Il barone di rocca antica, an operetta giocosa from Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, requires only four singers. »
21 Jan 2007
There is a (no doubt apocryphal) story that if one listens carefully to Caballé’s recordings there is a slight sshhh-sound in the background; the sound of the knife she uses to cut open her scores while recording. »
21 Jan 2007
This issue from DG’s own classic recital series is a copy of the 1963 LP. »
21 Jan 2007
Serge Jaroff and his Don Cossacks Choir were for many decades legendary performers of Russian choral music, ranging from the liturgical works of Orthodoxy to beloved regional folk melodies. »
21 Jan 2007
This Sellars production had its origins at the 1985 Pepsico Summerfare Festival in Purchase NY. »
19 Jan 2007
These recordings prove decisively a well-known thesis: more or less realistic productions always age better than so called innovative modern productions which often only aggrandize the clichés of the time of their conception if one views them a few decades after their première. »
17 Jan 2007
If the audience for new American art music seems small and is (supposedly) shrinking, then the
audience for new American operas is even more exclusive. »
