So EMI has declared this 1988 Porgy and Bess to be one of the ìGreat Recordings of the Century.î That may settle the issue for many ñ but not all.
Category: Reviews
A NICE COUP: VILLAZ”N in his first ìWERTHERî
The French city of Nice has this past week been enjoying some wonderful weather and the aptly-named Cote díAzur has truly lived up to its name.
STRAUSS: Capriccio
It is not uncommon for opera on DVD to have credits for two directors. In the case of this Paris Capriccio, a new production from June 2004, the credits list Robert Carsen as the stage director and Francois Roussillon as directing for TV and video.
Trinity Sunday at Westminster Abbey
Under the direction of James OíDonnell since January 2000, the Choir of Westminster Abbey has cultivated a robust singing style that well serves the music of this new recording and continues the Abbeyís position as one of the obvious standard bearers of the English cathedral tradition.
Berlin Opera Night
At 73 minutes, this DVD of the typical gala affair ñ various soloists trot on, sing an aria, then trot off ñ canít be called generous, but it does have variety.
MASSENET: Werther
When you and I were young Maggie, there was only the fine Werther with Thill and Vallin and the Cetra recording with Tagliavini and his first wife, Pia Tassinari.
SCHEIDT: Ludi musici I, II, III & IV
I suspect that when we survey the musical landscape of the early seventeenth century, it is opera, monody, and madrigal that come most quickly and lastingly into view, and given the contemporaneous attention given to the relationship between music and word, it is unsurprising that this would be the case.
CACCINI: Nuove musiche
When Giulio Caccini entitled his landmark 1601/02 publication Le nuove musiche, he confidently laid claim both to the novelty of the emerging baroque style and his formidable role in bringing it to blossom.
GASPAROV: Five Operas and a Symphony
This new volume from Yale University Press is one of those rare and treasured phenomena in Russian music scholarship that illuminate their subject from a new angle ó that of cultural history. Indeed, Boris Gasparov’s expressed goal in Five Operas and a Symphony is nothing less than turning the table on poetry, philosophy, and literary criticism that have for so long ruled the field of Slavic research, and elucidating them from a musical point of view.
IT MUST NOT HAVE BEEN EASY BEING MOZART
It must not have been an easy life, being Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). Perhaps even more so after the fact when scholars began to do their research and ìwanna besî began their intimations and psychoanalyzing. In the more seventy-five years of Mozart scholarship and its coming of age, one must ask: How much more is there to learn, to research?