Following from the fine collaboration between Stephan Genz and Roger Vignoles on an ambitious collection of various sets of Mahler’s Lieder (Hyperion CD 67392), which includes some of the composer’s early settings of poetry from the anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the present recording contains thirteen later settings from that source.
Month: August 2009
Bellini: Il Pirata
This 1958 RAI broadcast of Bellini’s early masterpiece requires the accustomed aural compromise for maximum enjoyment.
Central City Opera 2009
Central City stages luminous Lucia
There’s the sextet, the greatest “hit” in all of opera when Caruso was in the cast, and there’s the “Mad Scene,” that exercise in vocal acrobatics that brought new glory to bel canto when the opera was new in Naples in 1835.
Verdi’s Macbeth at the Sferisterio Opera Festival
The opera venue at Macerata shares some features with its famous counterpart in Verona: both are outdoors, with huge stages that can accommodate spectacular productions.
Fidelio at the Proms
Fidelio is not just any opera. But then, Beethoven is not just any composer. His only opera — unless one counts Leonore as a work in itself — confounds bureaucratic expectations.
Manon Lescaut at the Festival Puccini di Torre del Lago
Each year, the tiny Tuscan village Torre del Lago hosts a festival dedicated to its favorite son, Giacomo Puccini. This year’s Puccini Festival (10 July – 30 August) featured a “new” Manon Lescaut (a co-production with Opera del Nice Theater), its premiere garnering standing ovations for Marcello Giordani and Martina Serafin and accolades for Alberto Veronesi, the artistic director of the Festival.
Leh‰r: Die Blaue Mazur
As the detail-filled booklet essay to this CPO set reminds its readers, Franz Leh‰r’s operettas enjoyed widespread, though rarely lasting, success, with the music theater world of the time eager for each successive work.
Franz Schreker : Die Gezeichneten, Salzburg
Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten isn’t the easiest opera to produce, with its grand effects, but this production comes close to being a perfect union between stage and music.
Louis Andriessen De Staat at the Proms
De Staat is a seminally important work. So much modern music stems from it, not only “serious” classical music but progressive popular music too. It “is” music theatre, for it’s designed to be experienced live, the visual effect part of the action.
Zelmira in Pesaro
August is when Italians immerse themselves in the primal soup of all life. Hordes swarm to the Mediterranean shores and multitudes arrive in Pesaro on the Adriatic, where just then crowds of Rossinians from around the world arrive to partake of their primal operatic soup.