Category: Recordings

Gounod you know, but how about Gouvy?

Bonus features on opera DVDs usually get generic names, such as “Interview” or “Backstage with…”

A handsome black steed bows its head, eyes open, peering into the darkness around it.

It can be fascinating, although not necessarily pleasant, to see oneself through the eyes of others.

The Voltaire maxim usually given in English as “The perfect is the enemy of the good” illuminates the artistic conflicts surrounding many a Wagner production.

Since 2006, movie cineplexes across the USA have attracted a somewhat unlikely crowd for Saturday matinees, from fall to spring.

Pilgrimages, I suspect, derive a degree of their fruitfulness from the slowness of the journey, a pace born of desire or necessity, that removes the journey from the quotidian, brings the purpose into greater focus, and allows for a richer savoring of the experience.

Before a single track has been heard, Jordi Savall’s The Forgotten Kingdom impresses with its scale: a three-CD set packaged in a lavish, bound book that contains fifty dense pages of English commentary by nine different authors; adding the multiple translations, beautiful illustrations, and song texts, the book itself luxuriantly sprawls over 500 pages.

Philipp Stˆlzl’s production of Benvenuto Cellini, from the 2007 Salzburg Festival, is weird almost beyond belief.

Classic films often receive the honor of a full “restoration,” especially when a new viewing format appears.