Category: Recordings

With some deliberation the Metropolitan Opera releases DVD versions of live television broadcasts from its heyday as a PBS mainstay.

A classic Seinfeld episode revolved around a brush with the “third” of the Three Tenors – the one whom no one could quite put a name to.

Known almost iconically for his symphonies, Anton Bruckner devoted a great deal of his compositional output to vocal music, including choral works in both German and Latin.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French instrumental music was closely identified with dance and dance suites.

Although milestones in the history of opéra-comique, Grétry’s operas are infrequently revived and rarely recorded.

This 2005 production of the Mozart-Da Ponte masterpiece Don Giovanni makes for a frustrating experience.

When Matilde di Shabran was premiered in Rome on Feb. 24, 1821, it was billed as a
“melodrama giocoso” (which is the equivalent of an opera semiseria), somewhere between an opera buffa and an opera seria in character.

Asked in an interview by Opera News on his opinion on updating, James Levine replied that it often intensified one or another aspect of the story but that in general it was not possible to update without distorting the story and the equilibrium in the whole opera.

Our modern sense of the eighteenth-century Lutheran cantata derives in large part from the works of J. S. Bach—works that have been foundational in the early music movement, works that have much shaped our understanding of Bach, and works that we now know in an impressive array of different recordings.

I am surely not the only one who doesn’t understand why this sparkling score is not performed
more often.