The Italian phrase in angustie means something like “in distress,” “in a tight bind,” or “under pressure from all sides.” Angustie derives from the Latin “angustus”—narrow—and is related to the…
Category: Reviews
Auber’s Siren Enchants Anew, in a Long-Needed First Recording
Auber’s comic operas – once a mainstay of theaters throughout Europe, the Americas, and perhaps beyond – are slowly making their way back into the lives of music lovers through…
Sondra Radvanovsky and Piotr Beczała: Met Stars Live in Concert
January can be a dull and depressing month, and this year it is particularly difficult to keep faith that a light will eventually shine through the darkness. But, a soul-lifting…
The Twilight of Dreams in Palermo
Il crepuscolo dei sogni burst out of Palermo’s Teatro Massimo last Tuesday thanks to YouTube streaming. The link to the resulting video is below.
Pelham Humfrey – Sacred Choral Music
Until just recently the church music of Pelham Humfrey (1647/8-74) was represented on disc with just two dedicated recordings: one from 1992 with the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge (Nicholas…
Opera Holland Park marks Holocaust Memorial Day in words and music
In November 2014, an exhibition opened in Brno entitled Janáček’s Most Talented Student to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the death of the Czech composer Pavel Haas. In 1941, Haas…
Silenced art speaks powerfully in English Touring Opera’s Shostakovich-Britten pairing
Six years before he composed the Six Romances on Verses by British Poets (namely, Shakespeare, Raleigh and Burns), Shostakovich’s career as a composer of opera came to an abrupt halt…
Opera Rara bring Donizetti’s Il Paria in from the cold
‘Entirely without merit,’ wrote one contemporary reviewer of Donizetti’s Il Paria, which received only six performances in January 1829 at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples and then disappeared into…
Soli Deo Gloria: Philippe Pierlot directs the Ricercar Consort and Collegium Vocale in Bach’s cantatas
Under the direction of Belgian viola da gamba player Philippe Pierlot, the Ricercar Consort continue their exploration of J.S. Bach’s sacred cantatas – an intermittent project over the last twenty…
James King, Eileen Farrell and William Steinberg premiere Act II of Tristan und Isolde with the Boston Symphony in 1972
Between 1959 and 1973, a year after William Steinberg ended his tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, works by Richard Wagner had featured only rarely on his…