This recording on the Gimell label, the seventh of nine in a series by the Tallis Scholars which will document Josquin des PrÈs’ settings of the Mass (several of these and other settings are of disputed authorship), might be titled ‘Sacred and Profane’, or ‘Heaven and Earth’.
Year: 2018
Piotr Becza?a – Polish and Italian art song, Wigmore Hall London
Can Piotr Becza?a sing the pants off Jonas Kaufmann ? Becza?a is a major celebrity who could fill a big house, like Kaufmann does, and at Kaufmann prices. Instead, Becza?a and Helmut Deutsch reached out to that truly dedicated core audience that has made the reputation of the Wigmore Hall : an audience which takes music seriously enough to stretch themselves with an eclectic evening of Polish and Italian song.
Soloists excel in Chelsea Opera Group’s Norma at Cadogan Hall
“Let us not be ashamed to be carried away by the simple nobility and beauty of a lucid melody of Bellini. Let us not be ashamed to shed a tear of emotion as we hear it!”
Handel’s Serse: Il Pomo d’Oro at the Barbican Hall
Sadly, and worryingly, there are plenty of modern-day political leaders – both dictators and the democratically elected – whose petulance, stubbornness and egoism threaten the safety of their own subjects as well as the stability and security of other nations.
Dutch touring Tosca is an edge-of-your-seat thriller
Who needs another Tosca? Seasoned opera buffs can be blasé about repertoire mainstays. But the Nederlandse Reisopera’s production currently touring the Netherlands is worth seeing, whether it is your first or your hundred-and-first acquaintance with Puccini’s political drama. The staging is refreshing and pacey. Musically, it has the four crucial ingredients: three accomplished leads and a conductor who swashbuckles through the score in a blaze of color.
David Alden’s fine Lucia returns to ENO
The burden of the past, and the duty to ensure its survival in the present and future, exercise a violent grip on the male protagonists in David Alden’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor for English National Opera, with dangerous and disturbing consequences.
Verdi’s Requiem at the ROH
The full title of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem per l’anniversario della morte di Manzoni 22 maggio 1874 attests to its origins, but it was the death of Giacomo Rossini on 13th November 1868 that was the initial impetus for Verdi’s desire to compose a Requiem Mass which would honour Rossini, one of the figureheads of Italian cultural magnificence, in a national ceremony which – following the example of Cherubini’s C minor Requiem and Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts – was to be as much a public and political occasion as a religious one.
Wexford Festival 2018
The 67th Wexford Opera Festival kicked off with three mighty whacks of a drum and rooster’s raucous squawk, heralding the murderous machinations of the drug-dealing degenerate, Cim-Fen, in Franco Leoni’s one-act blood-and-guts verismo melodrama, L’oracolo … alongside an announcement by the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan, of an award of Ä1 million in capital funding for the National Opera House to support necessary updating and refurbishment works over the next 3 years.
A New La bohËme Opens Season at Lyric Opera of Chicago
Lyric Opera of Chicago opened its 2018-19 season with Giacomo Puccini’s La bohËme. This new production, shared with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and with the Teatro Real, Madrid, features an accomplished cast and innovative scenic approaches.
Leos Janacek: Missa Glagolitica
From Decca, Jan·?ek classics with Ji?Ì B?lohl·vek conducting the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Given that B?lohl·vek died in May 2017, all these recordings are relatively recent, not re-issues, and include performances of two new critical editions of the Glagolitic Mass and the Sinfonietta.