RÈgine Crespin: Wagner and Berlioz Opera Arias

For those who want to possess every single TV appearance of RÈgine Crespin, this issue will not suffice. Only four items of the EMI DVD devoted to the soprano are to be found on the short DVD that is included with this CD.

CATALANI: La Falce

Although nothing is mentioned on the cover of the CD, I think this is the first official recording of the opera even if there are some pirates doing the rounds of the collectors (my copy is a Buenos Aires pirate). So this is not an unimportant issue of Catalaniís first opera.

L’Elisir d’Amore at the Met ó Three Reviews

http://www.operatoday.com/content/2006/01/a_homegrown_col.php

L’Elisir d’Amore at the Met ó Three Reviews

The Metropolitan Opera presented Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore (The Elixir of Love), which “tells of the peasant Nemorino who decides to take some magic elixir sold to him by a quack doctor, so that he can win the heart of a wealthy land-owner, who (to spite Nemorino) has announced her marriage to a sergeant.” Here are three reviews:

Mozart-Sch‰del: Geheimnis um Echtheit wird gel¸ftet

http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=2293267

Scientists May Have Found Mozart’s Skull

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060103/ap_on_sc/austria_mozart_s_skull

Jonathan Lemalu: Love Blows as the Wind Blows

If one should believe British critics, especially English ones, Jonathan Lemalu is a major new bass; one of the greatest talents around whose qualities are widely proven by the fact this is already his third solo CD in a short time.

Opera at the Philharmonic

http://www.nysun.com/article/25215

Even at Concert Halls, It’s Location, Location, Location

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/arts/music/03seat.html

BRUCH: Das Lied von der Glocke

A century or so past, those simpler times without the internet, Desperate Housewives, and back-to-back sports and other activities that desperate parents feel they have to chauffeur their children to so theyíll be able to get into the higher levels of student loan debt, Americans joined choral societies and regularly presented well-known oratorios and cantatas: Elijah, The Seasons, maybe Christ on the Mount of Olives if they were really adventurous.