Category: Recordings

So much has been written about the notorious scandal of May 29, 1913, the scandal of the reception of the premiere of Igor Stravinskyís ballet Le Sacre du Printemps, that it is easy to forget that the music itself was less the cause of the riotous activities than the subject, the dÈcor, and the dancing.

If anyone had played the soundtrack of those first numbers of the 1955 telecast, I would have looked up in surprise at first and would have wondered if an electronic wizard had cleaned up the acoustic recordings of that giant of French singing: Jean-Emile Vanni-Marcoux.

Originally issued in LP by Voce (100), this unfairly neglected work by Gaetano Donizetti is now available on the Bongiovanni (GB2386/87-2) label.

This version of Leh·rís second most popular operetta is not one for purists. By the mid-seventies, it was already clear that one of the biggest tragedies of Western classical music was taking place ó the disappearance of operetta with its tons of wonderful music.

We live in a time of Tristan & Isolde ó recordings of the great Wagner opera, that is.

Rossini’s original Italian opera, Mose In Egitto, was re-adapted as Moise et Pharaon for Paris. A new libretto, the renaming of certain characters, some new music, a ballet and reordering of the original music make up the newer version.

A superstar in Europe, Edita Gruberova can rest assured that future generations have the opportunity to appreciate her artistry: the record label Nightingale Classics exists primarily, it seems, to record her in her greatest roles.

As the second of four of the thematically organized recording of the Complete Songs of Gabriel FaurÈ (1845-1924), Un paysage choisi is an excellent offering of chansons that concern selected natural places, that is to say, the ìchosen landscapeî indicated in the title of this volume.

Sergei Prokofievís Ivan the Terrible? Which one? Prokofiev composed music for Sergei Eisensteinís film (part 1, 1942-44; part 2, 1945) about the sixteenth-century ruler, and the score is catalogued as op. 116. After the composerís death, music for the film was arranged first into an oratorio (with speaker, soloists, chorus, and orchestra) by Alexander Stasevich (1961) and later into a concert scenario by Christopher Palmer (1990).

Ralph Vaughan Williams and Charles Ives; both known more for their symphonic music than anything else, receive superb tributes in these recordings of some of their early songs. Only two years separate the birth dates of these composers; but the musical language each speaks seems to put far more distance than that between them.