The premise for this new issue from Alpha is supposedly the tension between light and dark, suggested in the French term ‘clair-obscur’, and explored through orchestral songs inclined towards a…
Category: Reviews
Three Engaging New Song Cycles, Sung to Perfection on an Award-Winning CD by Soprano Deborah Sternberg
The general level of musical performance nowadays has risen around the world. Well-tuned orchestras pop up everywhere, and highly capable fiddlers, keyboard-ticklers, and singers (I’m tempted to write, in the…
Fatma Said and Joseph Middleton open Leeds Lieder’s spring festival with ravishing Ravel
“Asie, Asie, Asie. Vieux pays merveilleux des contes …” At the start of Ravel’s Shéhérazade, Tristan Klingsor’s Arabian princess proffers a languorous introduction to that ‘old marvellous land of tales’, and…
A charming L’heure espagnole from Grange Park Opera
Grange Park Opera’s latest online production is a horophile’s fantasy fulfilled. For one hour, Toledo is transported to Kensington Church Street where, amid the grandfather, cuckoo, mantel, hook-and-spike and lantern…
Proud Songsters: a luxury CD from alumni of King’s College, Cambridge
Compiled by nine former choral scholars of King’s College, Cambridge and recorded just before the worldwide pandemic transformed our lives, this anthology is a marvellous century-plus traversal of familiar and…
Four Song Cycles by Saint-Saëns, Superbly Rendered by the Mellifluous Baritone Tassis Christoyannis
I raved about Greek-born baritone Tassis Christoyannis’s CD of songs by Félicien David and a follow-up 2-CD set of songs by Édouard Lalo . In American Record Guide, the late…
Dame Emma Kirkby and Friends: Abiding Love
Dame Emma Kirkby’s Live from London, Spring concert coincided with Mothering Sunday, and Kirkby and the ‘Friends’ whom she had invited to perform with her had curated an eclectic and…
Formidable performances from singer/director Nathalie Stutzmann in Contralto
We’re used to thinking of castrati as the operatic superstars of the 18th century. Even today one can readily bring to mind the names Farinelli and Senesino from among hundreds…
Schubert’s Women: a recital of poetry and song
Schubert’s Women, a programme of lieder and poetry,was born from a serendipitous collaborative pairing during a summer lieder master-course at the Franz-Schubert-Institut in Baden in 2017, which brought together the…
Paisiello’s 1785 Opera about “Trofonio’s Cave” Adds Welcome and Hilarious Complications to a Libretto Previously Set by Salieri
The opera world in Mozart’s day recycled successful plots and characters much as the worlds of film and Broadway theater do today. In October 1785, in Vienna, Antonio Salieri had…