Category: Recordings

Good news for lovers of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro: the
famous Living Stereo recording, a co-production of RCA Victor and English
Decca, is now available again, well remastered, on Urania.

In May 2016, Opera Rara gave Bellini aficionados a treat when they gave a concert performance of Vincenzo Bellini’s first opera, Adelson e Salvini, at the Barbican Hall. The preceding week had been spent in the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios, and this recording, released last month, is a very welcome addition to Opera Rara’s bel canto catalogue.

Jonas Kaufmann Mahler Das Lied von der Erde is utterly unique but also works surprisingly well as a musical experience. This won’t appeal to superficial listeners, but will reward those who take Mahler seriously enough to value the challenge of new perspectives.

A new recording, made late last year, Morfydd Owen : Portrait of a Lost Icon, from T? Cerdd, specialists in Welsh music, reveals Owen as one of the more distinctive voices in British music of her era : a grand claim but not without foundation. To this day, Owen’s tally of prizes awarded by the Royal Academy of Music remains unrivalled.

The Feast at Solhaug : Henrik Ibsen’s play Gildet paa Solhaug (1856) inspired Wilhelm Stenhammer’s opera Gillet p Solhaug. The world premiere recording is now available via Sterling CD, in a 3 disc set which includes full libretto and background history.

Honours yet again to Oehms Classics who understand the importance of excellence. A composer as good, and as individual, as Walter Braunfels deserves nothing less.

‘Can great music be inspired by the throw of the dice?’ asks Peter Phillips, director of The Tallis Scholars, in his liner notes to the ensemble’s new recording of Josquin’s Missa Di dadi (The Dice Mass). The fifteenth-century artist certainly had an abundant supply of devotional imagery. As one scholar has put it, during this age there was neither ‘an object nor an action, however trivial, that [was] not constantly correlated with Christ or salvation’.

Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto was the composer’s ?fteenth opera, and the ninth to a libretto by Giovanni Faustini (1615-1651). First performed at the Teatro Sant’Apollinaire in Venice on 28th November 1651, the opera by might have been sub-titled ‘Gods Behaving Badly’, so debauched are the deities’ dalliances and deviations, so egotistical their deceptions.

New from Oehms Classics, Walter Braunfels Orchestral Songs Vol 1. Luxury singers – Valentina Farcas, Klaus Florian Vogt and Michael Volle, with the Staatskapelle Weimar, conducted by Hansjˆrg Albrecht.