Harmonia mundi has now reached another significant milestone in its on-going Beethoven series. This new release once again sees René Jacobs directing the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, here joined by the…
Category: Recordings
Cimarosa’s The Impresario in Distress Gets Its First Modern Recording
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…
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…
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 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…
Il tabarro: Marek Janowski and the Dresden Philharmonic continue their series of verismo operas
During the 1880s and 1890s, Italian publishers were making a concerted effort to find a successor to Giuseppe Verdi who, however, remained a towering force in Italian operatic life. The…
Mozart’s Betulia Liberata: Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques
Metastasio must have topped the charts in Padua in the early 1770s. Performances of settings of his libretto Betulia Liberata seem to have abounded, with the Bohemian Josef Mysliveček’s account,…
John Sheppard’s Media vita: The Choir of New College, Oxford
Modern scholarship directed at the English Reformation composer John Sheppard (c.1515-58) has come a long way since Peter le Huray’s research during the 1960s and David Wulstan’s pioneering performances a…