Category: Reviews

There is a (no doubt apocryphal) story that if one listens carefully to CaballÈís recordings there is a slight sshhh-sound in the background; the sound of the knife she uses to cut open her scores while recording.

This issue from DGís own classic recital series is a copy of the 1963 LP.

Serge Jaroff and his Don Cossacks Choir were for many decades legendary performers of Russian choral music, ranging from the liturgical works of Orthodoxy to beloved regional folk melodies.

This Sellars production had its origins at the 1985 Pepsico Summerfare Festival in Purchase NY.

These recordings prove decisively a well-known thesis: more or less realistic productions always age better than so called innovative modern productions which often only aggrandize the clichÈs of the time of their conception if one views them a few decades after their premiËre.

Some interesting repertory choices and the participation of some of today’s most attractive singers make this particular “gala” evening of “walk on-sing-walk off” entertainment more consistently enjoyable than these affairs often are.

The ever-busy Brian Large directed the 1989 filming (for TV) of a Wolfgang Wagner Tannh‰user production which had debuted at Bayreuth in 1985.

Recording a Shostakovich cycle has become de rigueur in recent years ó a conductorís mandatory right of passage, like recording a Beethoven or a Mahler cycle.

ìEra la notteî presents four highly emotional, seventeenth-century Italian works, sung with commanding theatricality by Anna Caterina Antonacci.