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…
Category: Recordings
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…
Choir of Keble College, Oxford: Ave Rex Angelorum
Ancient plainchant, medieval texts and numinous harmonies form a unifying thread for this uplifting recent disc from the Choir of Keble College Oxford recorded in the warm acoustic of Buckfast…
Simon Mold: Song Cycles
As an ex-chorister of Peterborough Cathedral and varied involvement as a lay-clerk, Simon Mold has enjoyed working within the centuries-old church music tradition, affording him valuable encounters with some of…
Britten: A Ceremony of Carols – Choir of Clare College, Cambridge
It’s a bold director who decides to explore Benjamin Britten’s smaller and relatively minor choral repertoire alongside the seldom recorded SATB version of A Ceremony of Carols. As the booklet…
Joachim Raff: Benedetto Marcello
Here’s yet another very effective German opera post-Weber but not by Wagner! We hear and see so few of these! I was quite taken in the past two years with…
Dmytro Popov: Hymns of Love
Two years ago, the Ukrainian tenor Dmytro Popov wooed the audience at Wigmore Hall with Russian romances, in a recital (with the Lithuanian mezzo-soprano Justina Gringytė) of songs by Tchaikovsky,…
Bruckner Mass in E minor & Te Deum: Collegium Vocale Gent
Philippe Herreweghe, Collegium Vocale Gent and the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées bring together two sides of Anton Bruckner’s deep-rooted spirituality. Whether expressed through the rich polyphony of the Mass in E…
World-Premiere Recording: Montemezzi’s One-Act L’incantesimo (1943) Weaves a Spell
Here, from a performance (apparently unstaged) in the hall of the Milan Conservatory (on October 26, 2018), is a one-act opera by Italo Montemezzi (1875-1952), followed by an early Debussy…