Category: Recordings

What is the worst opera with the best music?

The Gala release of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony from Hamburg performances on 29 and 30 November 1954 serves to document further the composer’s presence in the concerto hall prior to the well-known Mahler-renewal in 1960.

“Mozart’s first mature masterpiece,” Sophie Becker calls Idomeneo in the booklet essay of this DVD set of a June 2008 Bayerische Staatsoper staging.

From the La Scala series of filmed productions come two excellent DVDs, one an incisive and contemporary staging by Patrice Chereau of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and the other a rip-roaring, old-fashioned (in the best sense) performance of Donizetti’s flawed but entertaining Maria Stuarda.

Otto Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor belongs to that somewhat purgatorial group of operas best remembered only for their overtures.

In its recent collection Mozart Lieder, Salzburg 1958-1984 in its series entitled “Festspiel Dokumente,” Orfeo pays homage to the tradition of Liederabend at the Salzburg Festival with selections from a quarter century of performances.

On any list of great but seldom-performed operas, Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freisch¸tz must rank high.

Recorded live in concert on 19 August 2007, this performance of Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony by Claudio Abbado is part of the conductor’s cycle involving the Lucerne Festival.

Recorded four years apart, these two classic recordings of Leos Jan·?ek’s dramatic masterpieces now reappear in Decca’s The Originals series, thankfully still with full librettos and excellent booklet essays.

Doris Sennefelder’s booklet essay for this CPO recording of Lehar’s Das Land des L‰chelns details how close the composer was to Puccini.