Recently in Reviews
31 Aug 2006
The program for this recent recording from the choir of Westminster Cathedral presents sacred choral works by Brahms and Rheinberger, anchored at one end by Brahms’s youthful Missa Canonica and at the other by Rheinberger’s Mass for Double Choir in E-flat, Op. 109. with a handful of motets by Brahms in between. »
29 Aug 2006
This cast looks quite promising on paper. However, I cannot honestly say these big names keep their promise, except for the comprimario-singers. »
29 Aug 2006
I can readily understand why Bayreuth refuses to perform Richard Wagner’s third opera. »
29 Aug 2006
Verdi responded to the death of Rossini in 1868 by planning a collaborative Requiem Mass, drawing on the contributions of thirteen “distinguished” composers. »
28 Aug 2006
Francis Poulenc is well known for the religious works that comprise much of his oeuvre after he was traumatized by the accidental and premature death of his friend Pierre-Octave Ferroud in 1936. »
28 Aug 2006
The music of John Dunstable embodies many of the characteristics that so dramatically set the music of the emerging Renaissance apart from its Medieval forebears. »
28 Aug 2006
Sometimes an invidious comparison cannot be avoided, and such is the case with two recent DVD versions of Georg Frederic Handel's masterpiece, Giulio Cesare. »
25 Aug 2006
The English “Oxbridge” choral tradition tends to be a cohesive one, most often with choirs of men and boys receiving similar training, singing a largely shared repertory in similar venues and in similar contexts. »
25 Aug 2006
Harry Christophers and The Sixteen have a particular affinity for pre-modern polyphony, as their long discography, teeming with the music of the Eton Choirbook, assorted Renaissance masters, Handel, Bach, and others, amply shows. »
25 Aug 2006
Some argue that Bayreuth ushered in the modern era of regietheatre in opera productions with its now-legendary centennial Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed by Patrice Chereau. »
25 Aug 2006
In Turkey recently, we visited a second-grade classroom, where our guide invited the children to sing songs for us. »
25 Aug 2006
It seems only natural that the quality of radiance should quickly come to mind in contemplating the twelfth-century Basilica of Saint Denis, where luminous stained glass creates colored walls of mystical light. »
25 Aug 2006
Pentatone Classics joins some smaller recording companies staking out niche markets as the biggest labels continue their enforced retreat from the classical marketplace. »
25 Aug 2006
In recent European reviews, Teatro Regio di Parma’s DVD of their 2004 Verdi Gala was generally labeled as worthless. »
25 Aug 2006
Tower Records online DVD page shows eleven available incarnations of Verdi's classic La Traviata, four of which have appeared in the last year, including one filmed at the reopening of La Fenice in Venice, and a Zurich production reviewed recently for Opera Today by yours truly. »
25 Aug 2006
This installment of the estimable Bach Cantata Pilgrimage recordings brings together cantatas from the middle of the Epiphany season, along with a “refugee” from Trinity XXIV), and the well-known motet, “Jesu, meine Freude.” »
25 Aug 2006
This is a most sympathetic performance, though perhaps being a Fleming helps. In my small country on the frontier of Northern and Southern European influences, many musical styles made their entrance and became popular. »
25 Aug 2006
Internationally acclaimed soprano, Solveig Kringelborn, now has recorded a delightful selection of late nineteenth-century German Lieder on the NMA label. »
25 Aug 2006
In making words sing, to use a phrase from a recent study of the poetics of vocal composition, Aribert Reimann (b. 1936) does not emulate another composer as much as he makes fashions his own lines and punctuates them with accompaniments that serve as a means of accentuating the text. »
25 Aug 2006
We can easily imagine the pleasure that Bach must have taken in presiding over a household that was both large and talented enough to form its own complete ensemble. »
25 Aug 2006
Had Plato been a 19th century opera fan, would the philosopher have been so sure that there exists an ideal version of each and every opera, in the way that all chairs come from one immutable concept of "chair"? »
13 Aug 2006
Myto is always generous with its timings, usually producing very full CD’s and thus of necessity offering a bonus if a performance doesn’t fill the whole of the record. »
13 Aug 2006
Most of us who listen to opera often chose a work to relax us on a quiet evening; perhaps lighting some candles, and opening that bottle of good vino you’ve been saving for a special occasion. »
10 Aug 2006
When the Ring theater burned in Vienna, on December 8, 1881,1 Richard Wagner commented that it left him “cold” to know that a number of patrons should die while at a performance of Jacques Offenbach’s music. »
09 Aug 2006
Carmen and The Magic Flute have finally made it onto my calendar, a nice way to end the summer opera festival at Santa Fe. »
03 Aug 2006
The Waldbühne in Berlin is a large copy of ancient Greek theatres. Originally it was the ‘Reichssportfeld’, built for the Olympic Games of 1936. »
02 Aug 2006
In summer doldrums? Spend a delightful hour with two great artists in a rare joint appearance, as Fabula Classics has resurrected for DVD a 1985 Cesare Siepi and Mirelle Freni televised recital. »
02 Aug 2006
Commemorating some of its outstanding concerts of the 1980s and Bernard Haitink, its principal conductor (from 1967-1979), the London Philharmonic Orchestra has released on its own label a single CD that includes several
pieces that brought notice to the ensemble. »
02 Aug 2006
Recorded in early May 2005 at Crear, an artists’ community in Argyll, Scotland, this CD contains selections of Lieder and songs that fit well the supple voice of the mezzo-soprano Ann Murray, who is accompanied facilely by the Scottish pianist Malcolm Martineau. »
01 Aug 2006
Connoisseurs of pretentious booklet essay verbiage will delight in the prose style of Matthias Kellerin his musings for this EuroArts DVD of Ennio Morricone conducting his film scores with the Munich radio orchestra. »
31 Jul 2006
The news from Santa Fe Opera last week-end is good, unexpectedly so. The British composer Thomas Ades’ new (2004) opera, a riff on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, has been rumored hard to perform and harder to hear. »
27 Jul 2006
Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri is a large-scale Passion work dedicated to the Swedish chapelmaster, Gustav Dübin, in whose notable collection, now at Uppsala, it holds a prominent place. »
27 Jul 2006
Was it so many years ago that lovers of Wagner's titanic multi-part opus, Der Ring Des Nibelung, focused their passion principally on audio versions? »
24 Jul 2006
“These probably unique documents may well owe their existence to the presence of Joan Sutherland in the cast and represent the earliest recordings of the great diva. »
24 Jul 2006
Naxos reinforces its status as the classical recording world's bargain leader by releasing a single CD highlights disc from its complete Don Giovanni, recorded in 2000 and originally released in 2001. »
24 Jul 2006
This is a highly impressive coffee-table table book, loaded with stunning photographs of productions, singers, composers, and even our nation’s glorious capital. »
24 Jul 2006
Richard Strauss’ 1905 neurotic shocker Salome has long been a favorite Santa Fe Opera repertory piece, having enjoyed ten productions over the years. »
24 Jul 2006
This new Naxos recording offers a rare opportunity to hear three little-known works by one of the 20th century's greatest composers - The Execution of Stepan Razin op. 119, October op. 131, and Five Fragments for orchestra op. 42, by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75). »
24 Jul 2006
Is this the application of Peter’s Principle on Ruperto Chapi’s music as Chris Webber, editor of www.zarzuela.net preaches, or is this proof of Chapi being “undoubtedly the most important Spanish
composer of stage music of all time” as the sleeve notes tell us? »
24 Jul 2006
Its foundational interest in affective response made the early Baroque era a time rich in the nurture of highly impassioned music and text. Little surprise then that laments, with their characteristic emotional intensity, were particularly at home on the early seventeenth-century stage and in the chambers of the nobility. »
24 Jul 2006
Whatever its flaws - and it has them - this Zurich Opera production of Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande boasts qualities that carry it very far from the standard view of those opera goers who considers the work dry, dull, and depressingly long. »
24 Jul 2006
Recorded approximately 35 years ago in September 1971, Bernard Haitink’s performance of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony remains a classic account of the composer’s demanding score. »
24 Jul 2006
Refreshingly modern and familiar at the same time, the Lieder of Willy Burkhard (1900-55) are better known in his native Switzerland than anywhere else. »
23 Jul 2006
Most Opera Today readers are probably familiar with Gian Carlo Menotti largely through his operas (The Medium, The Consul, Amahl and the Night Visitors, The Telephone, and others), and, if they teach or coach voice, may be more familiar than they’d like to be with pieces like “This is my box” and “Monica’s Waltz”, which have long been mainstays of the
“American aria” branch of repertoire for young singers. »
19 Jul 2006
There are lieder-recitals and there are lieder-recitals. In my experience Lucia Popp, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Margaret Price stuck to their Lieder-guns till the last item, sometimes offering Strauss’ Zueignung as an encore. »
19 Jul 2006
This excellent performance of Beethoven's mammoth sacred work, Missa Solemnis, served as part of the
celebration of the reopening (after reconstruction) of the Dresden Frauenkirche, which suffered devastating damage in the same bombing raid that destroyed much of the city and so many of its inhabitants near the end of WWII. »
19 Jul 2006
The composers Morales, Guerrero, and Victoria form a holy trinity of sorts, dominating Spanish church music in what we have come to see as a “Golden Age,” a time in which sixteenth-century liturgical polyphony assumed a classical perfection. »
19 Jul 2006
I belong to the happy few (some would say ‘unhappy’ few) who ever witnessed a stage production of this rarely performed opera. »
