Category: Reviews

For those who frequent the Santa Fe Opera and Houston Grand Opera, Ana MarÌa MartÌnez is well-known as a superb lyric soprano on her way to a stellar career. With the release of this collection of songs and arias for soprano, the rest of the world will come to know this as well.

The first thought one has is ´ how nice to have those recitals back like they were issued ª. One remembers too well the first days of the CD when historical vocal recitals appeared more or less mutilated, often culled from two or more LPís so that some tracks were sorely missed.

The Lieder of Richard Strauss lend themselves well to various interpretations that bring out different aspects of the music.

This production, from Glyndebourne in 1975, is a treasure of literate, artistically informed stagecraft. Opera is meant to be seen as much as heard, and productions like this prove that good staging brings a score alive.

This is the third re-issue (in Europe anyway) on CD of the only existing studio recording of Stiffelio. Luckily it is a rather good one as its live competitors are not recordings for eternity. Neither Limarilli in 1968 nor Del Monaco (at his coarsest in 1972) have much sense of style, let alone a knack for true Verdi-phrasing. Not that JosÈ Carreras is flawless.

Tchaikovsky counted Sleeping Beauty as one of his best works. The idea came from Ivan Vsevolozhsky (1835-1909), director of the Russian Imperial Theatres from 1881 onward. He had staged several of Tchaikovskyís operas, and he wanted Tchaikovsky to produce a ballet score with him.

The formidable Straussian Sir Georg Solti wrote that after the 1929 death of Straussís long-time librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ìStrauss lived for another twenty years, but he never again wrote a great work.î

Khachaturian was one of the few Soviet composers of the Stalin regime to overcome his public demotion in 1948. Even though he was removed from his job and his works disappeared from the theatres, Khachaturian moved to the world of film music and waited for the storm to blow over.

This anthology, a twentieth-anniversary commemoration of Aled Jonesí first recording for the Welsh company, Sain, is a re-issue of that 1983 recording, ìDiolch ‚ Ch‚n,î along with several other tracks from the mid-1980ís. Jones stepped out of the choir stalls at Bangor Cathedral to become a highly marketed treble, and his relative celebrity, as attested here, was well deserved.