Giovanni Battista Sammartini (c.1700-1775) belongs to that shadowy generation of Italian composers who no longer composed in the high Baroque style, but had adopted the clarity, simplicity and regularity that would serve as the building blocks for the Viennese masters of the late eighteenth century, and thus were tagged with the rather pejorative label “pre-classic” (a plague on all those music historians who can only see musical style in terms of progress leading to their particular figure of veneration!).
Category: Reviews
Dust-bowl opera overwhelming at Minnesota premiere
The great American opera? Ricky Ian Gordon’s “Grapes of Wrath” might be it.
HANDEL: Agrippina
An expressionist portrait of the Roman she-wolf was the first, striking image of this production, originally devised for Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, by the fashionable British director David McVicar.
The Devil’s Dream
The duo of gambist Vittorio Ghielmi and lutenist Luca Pianca even has its own domain name
(www.pianca-ghielmi.com), as well as several previous releases, of which the first has perhaps my favorite CD title ever (Bagpipes from Hell).
ARNE: Six cantatas for a voice and instruments; Advice to Cloe
The English, though fundamental to the early music revival of the last half-century, have been rather remiss in exploring their native music dating from after the death of Purcell, and particularly that produced after the death of Handel.
VERDI: Rigoletto
Sorry my friends, but this rich-looking DVD has a feature that disqualifies it for me.
Houston stages a provocative “Faust”
A literary critic once recalled the day when a German could not clear his throat “without finding pithy precedent in Goethe.”
Houston takes fresh approach to Cenerentola
In opera, Rossini, born in 1892- the year after Mozart died, is the successor of the great master
and, when performed as perceptively as in the “Cenerentola” that debuted at the Houston Grand Opera on January 27, his rightful heir.
Jaume Aragall en Vivo
During any recital by an aging divo there comes a moment of truth when he sings an operatic aria
(usually E lucevan le stelle , as the highest note is an A). That is the defining moment when he no longer can hide behind idiosyncratic interpretation, expressive breathing and a lot of clever transpositions.
PURCELL: Dido and Aeneas
This disc is a reissue of a 1993 recording made at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, California, but new to me.