Category: Recordings

A century or so past, those simpler times without the internet, Desperate Housewives, and back-to-back sports and other activities that desperate parents feel they have to chauffeur their children to so theyíll be able to get into the higher levels of student loan debt, Americans joined choral societies and regularly presented well-known oratorios and cantatas: Elijah, The Seasons, maybe Christ on the Mount of Olives if they were really adventurous.

This 1959 recording is one where the whole is bigger and better than the separate parts. It is the German equivalent to the Cetra recordings of the fifties. Those were maybe not the greatest recording of an opera but one felt that everybody was steeped in the Italian tradition. The same is happening here.

One takes a look at the sleeve and one realizes the wheel has finally turned a full circle. It started to move with the Decca La Traviata (Gheorgiu as Violetta, conducted by Solti) in 1994. Downloading and pc-copies were still in the future but nevertheless sales of complete opera recordings were spectacularly falling off since the eighties.

Myto has the good sense to call a spade a spade. This is an issue exclusively meant for the Del Monaco-crowd and not for people wanting a Carmen or a Pagliacci. The set has one enormous quality: a brilliant natural sound that hides nothing and doesnít change the balance of the voices.

How easy it might be to overlook this lesser-known Schreker opera, composed in 1928 and dedicated to Schrekerís good friend Arnold Schoenberg, here in its recorded debut. It has a quite curious libretto, complex and multilayered, and Schreker moves between what are at times quite disparate styles.

Franz Schubertís song cycle Winterreise has been performed by many fine singers, who keep the work alive in the repertoire and in the imagination of audiences. In recent years the work has been subject to a variety of interpretations, and with this recording, the well-known tenor RenÈ Kollo offers his perspective on the work, accompanied by the young pianist Oliver Pohl.

The first thing I saw when I opened the La Scala DVD was a notice on the back that track 5 plays ìVa! Pensiero da: I vespri siciliani (1855).î One wonders if there is nobody at the La Scala Bookshop who has at least a bit of knowledge of one of the most popular pieces in the operatic repertoire that served Italy for more than hundred years as an unofficial anthem ó the Venice DVD has it right, of course.

Witold Lutos?awski (1913-94) composed vocal works throughout his career, and recording collects several pieces that involve female voices. His set of Twenty Polish Christmas Carols for soprano, womenís choir and orchestra is a late composition compiled between 1985 and 1989 and given its premiere in 1990.

Though singers have always recorded some of these arias and songs, it was young Leontyne Price who first started a trend by devoting a whole LP to the genre more than 45 years ago.

In its 2004 season Glyndebourne put on a double bill celebrating avarice ó Pucciniís Gianni Schicchi and the much-lesser known The Miserly Knight.