Category: Recordings

Ondine provides a treasure of a booklet for Fever, Karita Mattila’s traversal of some standards from the so-called “Great American Songbook,” plus two Brazilian numbers.

It almost seems as if every composer was entitled to have at least one unfinished work.

Released to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the three multi-disc sets of recordings makes available recordings that document the triumphs of the ensemble since its founding in 1932 by Sir Thomas Beecham.

Can this truly be the production of Verdi’s Aida that earned world-wide headlines in December 2007?

Alberto Cant˘’s booklet essay for the Dynamic release of Umberto Giordano’s rare one-act opera Marcella quotes a review from the day after the 1907 premiere, which indicates that the premiere’s audience’s expectations of “greater originality of melodic invention” went unmet.

This 2001 Z¸rich performance of Rossini’s masterpiece Il Barbiere di Siviglia boasts one of the final performances of the great bass Nicolai Ghiaurov, who passed away in 2004.

Naxos, in conjunction with SWR, has been releasing recordings from the Rossini in Wildbad Festival, which focuses not just on the titular composer but also on his contemporaries.

The “2” in this disc’s title indicates that this is the second Chandos recital for Sir Thomas Allen.

At a time when it is the fashion for stage direction, sets, and costumes to have little, if anything to do with the ouvre presented on stage, this production of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s PersÈe (1682) is candy for the eyes and ears, with adherence to what is known of the French Baroque operatic standards.¹

EMI owns this recording, so if pride dictates they repackage it in the “Great Recordings of the Century” series, a dissenter shouldn’t moralize.