Category: Recordings

Ravishing : Visions, VÈronique Gens in a glorious new recording of French operatic gems, with HervÈ Niquet conducting the M¸nchener Rundfunkorchester. This disc is a companion piece to NÈËre, where Gens sang familiar Duparc, Hahn, and Chausson mÈlodies.

Librettists have long mined the literature shelves for narratives that are ripe for musico-dramatic embodiment. On the whole, it’s the short stories and poems – The Turn of the Screw, Eugene Onegin or Death in Venice, for example – that best lend themselves to operatic adaptation.

Soprano Louise Alder has had an eventful few months. Declared ‘Young Singer of the Year’ at the 2017 International Opera Awards in May, the following month she won the Dame Joan Sutherland Audience Prize at the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World.

This is the only disc ever devoted to the art of Sesto Bruscantini (1919–2003). Record collectors value his performance of major baritone roles, especially comic but also serious ones, on many complete opera recordings, such as Il barbiere di Siviglia (with Victoria de los Angeles). He continued to perform at major houses until at least 1985 and even recorded Mozart’s Don Alfonso in 1991, when he was 72.

Detlev Glanert’s Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch should be a huge hit. Just as Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana appeals to audiences who don’t listen to early music (or even to much classical music), Glanert’s Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch has all the elements for instant popular success.

Only one Shakespeare play has resulted in three operas that get performed
today (whether internationally or primarily in one language-region). Perhaps
surprisingly, the play in question is a comedy that is sometimes considered a
lesser work by the Bard: The Merry Wives of Windsor.

There have to be special reasons to release a monophonic live recording of a
much-recorded opera. Often it can give us the opportunity to hear a singer in a
major role that he or she never recorded commercially—or did record on
some later occasion, when the voice was no longer fresh. Often a live recording
catches the dramatic flow better than certain studio recordings that may be
more perfect technically.

Critic and scholar John Barker has several times complained, in the pages of
American Record Guide, about Baroque vocal recitals that add
instrumental works or movements as supposed relief or (as he nicely calls them)
“spacers.”

Hans Knappertsbusch was one of the most renowned Wagner conductors who ever
lived. His recordings of Parsifal, especially, are near-legendary
among confirmed Wagnerians.