Henze: Der junge Lord

Hey man, you wanna take a trip? Groovy!

Domenico Sarro: Achille in Sciro

The birth and death dates of Domenico Sarro (1679 and 1744) are very close to those of his more illustrious contemporary, Antonio Vivaldi.

Mayr Rediscovered

Apparently Opera Rara “discovered” Giovanni Simone Mayr some years ago when it included several excerpts from his operas in their multi-volume series, “A Hundred Years of Italian Opera.”

Tippett: A Child of Our Time

Although an ineffable aura of the 1960s emanates from Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time, its composition came at the start of WWII in Europe.

ROSSINI: Il Barbiere di Siviglia — La Scala 1956

Il Barbiere di Siviglia [Almaviva, ossia L’inutile precauzione (‘Almaviva, or The Useless Precaution’)]: Commedia in two acts.

Luciano Pavarotti: The EMI Recordings

A Decca recording artist for most of his career, Luciano Pavarotti did do a very few items with EMI, probably as part of those “artist-swapping” arrangements recording labels sometime arrange.

Wagner’s Das Rheingold at Los Angeles Opera

There is some slim irony to an opera company pursuing the complicated business of staging Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in the current economy — it entails the very sort of dubious compromises that get Wotan and crew into such hot water (if one assumes the cataclysmic fire at the end of Gˆtterd‰mmerung heated the Rhine).

Charles Workman — the American dying to sing “Acis” for the Royal Opera

American? Well, yes, that’s what it says on one of his passports, but the other is British and he and his family reside in the UK and have done since 1995.

Bel canto, an escape into beauty

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article5859018.ece

Tristan und Isolde in Chicago

By the close of the first act of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in its current production at Lyric Opera of Chicago the audience has been given a strong impression of the multi-faceted characters bound up in the musical drama unfolding on stage.