Category: Recordings

At one point in her career, Eva Marton appeared poised to be the true inheritor of Birgit Nilsson’s legacy roles: Wagner and Strauss’s most dramatic heroines, as well as key Italian roles (Puccini in particular).

Five years after the premiËre of PellÈas et MÈlisande, Wilhelm
Worringer published the twentieth century’s first great treatise on
abstraction in art:

For many, the fine recordings of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan by the late Karl Bˆhm seem to have emerged full-spring from the baton of Karl Bˆhm and the playing of the various orchestras he led.

Throughout his relatively long and decidedly successful career, Giacomo Puccini returned to those operas of his that had not, immediately or eventually, secured an important place in the standard repertory.

Michael Hampe seems to have been the director of choice in the 1980s for tastefully traditional Rossini productions.

The Times used to have a music critic who seemed to feel that singing,
especially in costume, didn’t count as serious music, though he reviewed
opera anyway.

We all wish Henry Purcell had written a few more operas like Dido and
Aeneas — simple to cast, simple to stage, offering endless
possibilities for either reserved or outrageous treatment, attractive to every
sort of audience.

While Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) is best known to modern audiences for his colorful programmatic works associated with Italian locations, his vocal music is also engaging.

Are you sitting comfortably?

This disc faces a marketplace already crowded with similar compilations from major companies who can raid their archives to offer competitive interpretations at bargain prices.