Category: Reviews

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.

Most heroes in costume drama movies speak lines directly from our own time. Iíve yet to see a cinematic Roman general, being a serious hero, look at an animalís liver and says: ì this smells bad; no battle todayî.

The recording date is given as November the 12th 1994. Since recording sessions usually last more than one day, and as a radio orchestra is playing, we may safely assume this CD to be derived from a public broadcasted concert by the ë4 sopranosí capitalizing on the concept made popular by Domingo, Carreras, and Pavarotti.