Category: Reviews

Whatever its flaws – and it has them – this Zurich Opera production of Debussy’s PellÈas and MÈlisande boasts qualities that carry it very far from the standard view of those opera goers who considers the work dry, dull, and depressingly long.

Recorded approximately 35 years ago in September 1971, Bernard Haitinkís performance of Gustav Mahlerís Eighth Symphony remains a classic account of the composerís demanding score.

Refreshingly modern and familiar at the same time, the Lieder of Willy Burkhard (1900-55) are better known in his native Switzerland than anywhere else.

Most Opera Today readers are probably familiar with Gian Carlo Menotti largely through his operas (The Medium, The Consul, Amahl and the Night Visitors, The Telephone, and others), and, if they teach or coach voice, may be more familiar than they’d like to be with pieces like “This is my box” and “Monica’s Waltz”, which have long been mainstays of the
“American aria” branch of repertoire for young singers.

There are lieder-recitals and there are lieder-recitals. In my experience Lucia Popp, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Margaret Price stuck to their Lieder-guns till the last item, sometimes offering Strauss’ Zueignung as an encore.

This excellent performance of Beethoven’s mammoth sacred work, Missa Solemnis, served as part of the
celebration of the reopening (after reconstruction) of the Dresden Frauenkirche, which suffered devastating damage in the same bombing raid that destroyed much of the city and so many of its inhabitants near the end of WWII.

The composers Morales, Guerrero, and Victoria form a holy trinity of sorts, dominating Spanish church music in what we have come to see as a “Golden Age,” a time in which sixteenth-century liturgical polyphony assumed a classical perfection.

I belong to the happy few (some would say ‘unhappy’ few) who ever witnessed a stage production of this rarely performed opera.

Glyndebourne’s recent DVD release of it’s 1980 production of Die Entf¸hrung aus dem Serail is quite an exceptional performance of this particular work.