Category: Recordings

The general aversion of the listening public to vocal music can nowhere be more easily seen than in the comparative success of the operatic and instrumental works of the Italian baroque.

There was a great northward swing of composers from Italy to Paris and London in the 1820s and 1830s. Actually, this has been going on for a long time, but was temporarily halted by the Napoleonic wars.

Few works seem more seminal to our understanding of J. S. Bach than the church cantatas, written over a wide chronological swath of his career, sometimes as part of occasional duties, other times in what was clearly a frenzy of steady prolificity.

Sergio Seggalini, former editor of OpÈra International (now OpÈra Magazine), is the artistic director of both La Fenice and the Festival of Martina Franca.

“What a difference a sound makes” goes the song (or something like that).

By sheer coincidence I attended a concert performance of this opera at the Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp at the same moment I received these CDís.

When asked whether he believed Rossini had composed Il Barbiere di Siviglia in thirteen days, nineteen-year-old Donizetti is supposed to have replied,

Klaus-Edgar Wichmann, in the booklet essay to this Capriccio recording from 2002 of Otto Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, describes the work as having “asserted itself in the opera repertoire for more than a hundred years.”

A little over a year ago Bach scholar Michael Maul found himself in the exceedingly unusual position of having discovered a hitherto unknown Bach composition, a birthday ode for Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Weimar, entitled “Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn’ ihn.

Franz Schubert’s song cycle Die schöne Müllerin has received, in recent years, frequent attention with several fine recordings having been issued during this period.