In dedicating much of his creative life to the Thomaskirche, the German musician Günther
Ramin left his mark on the musical life of Leipzig, and his legacy includes a fine recording of
Johannes Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45.
Category: Reviews
BRAHMS: Ein deutsches Requiem
BRUCKNER: Symphony no. 4
Perhaps the best-known of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies, the Fourth also benefits from a
number of fine recordings.
Jean-Baptiste Lully, Armide (Opera Lafayette)
The Opera Lafayette of Washington DC has been engaged in a new project this season – the Armide Project, as the group dubbed its ambitious plan, in collaboration with the University of Maryland Opera Studio, to present two great operas set to the same celebrated Philippe Quinault libretto.
SAMMARTINI: Della Passione di Gesú Cristo; L’addolorata Divina Madre.
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!).
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.”