Category: Reviews

This recording of Musica Nuptialis celebrates occasional music and does so in a fittingly occasional manner.

Baritone Lado Ataneliís self-titled debut CD contains an impressive selection of arias intended to showcase the singerís style, range, and versatility.

In 1728 John Gayís Beggarís Opera was produced in London as a sardonic response to the ongoing craze for Italian opera seria.

Among recent recordings of music by Gustav Mahler, the 2004 release of the composerís Second Symphony conducted by Claudio Abbado stands out as an intense and highly charged performance.

Schoenberg, born in Vienna in 1874, is remembered as a composer and a music theorist. He held strong attitudes toward the craft of composition and its pedagogy, which have been received as the beginnings of a theory of music, though Schoenberg denied ever attempting to create a systematic theory.

When I was a young child, my mother purchased a blouse and brought it home to the acclaim of my aunts and older sisters. “Oh, that’s smart!” they pronounced, cooing and stepping back to admire the thing. Not a little bit jealous, I was taken aback.

ìI send my heart up to thee, all my heart in this, my singingî Robert Browning.

The title of this CD is taken from the text of one of Amy Beachís Three Browning Songs, which close the program. Given Deborah Voigtís ability to sing this program with completely natural expression and crystal clear diction while maintaining a consistently high standard of vocal production and musicianship, it is easy to believe that in her singing she shares with us something of what is most dear to her own heart. Fortunately for us, in doing this she is also giving us a fine recording of American art songs, some of which will be quite familiar to many listeners, others of which will be wonderful new discoveries.

Joachim Carlos Martini is well represented in the Naxos catalog with recordings of Handel oratorios, including Athalia, Saul, Il Trionfo del Tempo . . ., Deborah, the ìpasticcioî oratorios, Gideon and Nabal, and this recent release of LíAllegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato. Narrowly traditional views of what an oratorio ought to beóa Biblical narrative in a dramatic frameóare stretched here, and this is a good reminder that the term ìoratorioî was used flexibly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The 19th Century French composer Charles Gounod is best known for his lyric dramas / operas Faust (1859) and RomÈo et Juliette (1867), and the very popular MÈditation sur le 1er prÈlude de piano de J. S. Bach (1852), arranged as an Ave Maria in 1859. Yet the dominant portion of Gounodís creative output was church music, the amount of which surpassed that of any other composer of the 19th Century. In spite of this, the church music of Gounod remains an obscure portion of his oeuvre.

Sergei Rachmaninov established his reputation early in his career as one of the twentieth- centuryís foremost pianists and conductors. Critical assessment of his abilities as composer, however, was harsh. In the fifth edition of Groveís Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Eric Blom wrote dismissively: ìÖas a composer [Rachmaninov] can hardly be said to have belonged to his time at all,ÖHis music is well constructed and effective, but monotonous in texture, which consists in essence mainly of artificial and gushing tunesÖ.[His] enormous popular successÖis not likely to last,Öî In general, critics dismissed his musical language as outmoded, as being far from the mainstream of twentieth-century musical styles–indeed, most considered his works as anachronisms, composed by a man whose style had not left the late nineteenth century. Even Rachmaninov acknowledged feeling lost amid the music of most other twentieth-century composers. In a 1939 interview he gave for the Musical Courier, Rachmaninov said, ìI felt like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new.î