This live performance of Laurent Pelly’s Glyndebourne staging of
Humperdinck’s affectionately regarded fairy tale opera, was recorded at
Glyndebourne Opera House in July and August 2010, and the handsomely produced
disc set — the discs are presented in a hard-backed, glossy-leaved book and
supplemented by numerous production photographs and an informative article by
Julian Johnson — is certainly stylish and unquestionably recommendable.
Author: Gary Hoffman
Hänsel und Gretel
Magdalena Koûen·: Love and Longing
Recorded at a live performance in 2012, this CD brings together an eclectic
selection of turn-of-the-century orchestral songs and affirms the extraordinary
versatility, musicianship and technical accomplishment of mezzo-soprano
Magdalena Koûen·.
Once I was: Songs by Ricky Ian Gordon
Once I was: Songs by Ricky Ian Gordon features an assortment of
songs by Ricky Ian Gordon interpreted by soprano Stacey Tappan, a longtime
friend of the composer since their work on his opera Morning Star at
the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Prom 51: Tippett, Britten & Elgar
This programme of twentieth-century British music burst dazzlingly into life with the blazing flourishes of Michael Tippett’s Fanfare No.5, arranged by Meirion Bowen from music drawn from the composer’s oratorio, The Mask of Time.
Amore e Tormento
Alfredo Kraus, one of the most astute artists in operatic history in terms of careful management of technique and vocal resources, once said in an interview that ‘you have to make a choice when you start to sing and decide whether you want to service the music, and be at the top of your art, or if you want to be a very popular tenor.’†
Rivals—Arias for Farinelli & Co.
In generations past, an important singer’s first recording of Italian arias would almost invariably have included the music of Verdi.†
Prom 47: Brahms — A German Requiem
In the first of her two visits to the Royal Albert Hall this summer, Marin Alsop led the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its associated Choir through three nineteenth-century works which are united by their romantic intensity and progression from darkness to light.
Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform
Commonly viewed as a ‘second-rate’ composer — a European radical persecuted by the Nazis whose trans-Atlantic emigration represented a sell-out to an inferior American popular culture —
Billy Budd at Glyndebourne
In their magnificent Glyndebourne production of Billy Budd, first seen in 2010 and revived here to mark Britten’s centenary anniversary, director Michael Grandage (revival director, Ian Rutherford) and designer Christopher Oram immerse us, quite literally, in the harsh realities of life aboard a late-eighteen-century man-’o-war: the uncompromisingly, and perhaps optimistically, named Indomitable.