Opera Today

It is unfortunate that audiences tend to pigeonhole Xavier Montsalvatge (1912-2002) as a one-work composer. There is no doubt, however, that the popularity of his Canciones negras has overshadowed the rest of his output.

This new recording of two somewhat early works with music by Sir Arthur Sullivan provides a taste of Sullivan just before and just after the beginning of his famed collaboration with W. S. Gilbert. Cox and Box was produced in 1866. Trial by Jury debuted in 1875, four years after Thespis, Gilbert and Sullivanís first work as a team. The difference is apparent if not glaring. It is mostly noticeable in Sullivanís more nuanced response to Gilbertís libretto, which is far more sophisticated and clever than Burnandís nonetheless amusing effort. The transition from the end of the earlier work to the opening chorus of Trial by Jury, which immediately places us in the identifiable musical world of G&S, is remarkable. With Burnand, Sullivan is broader in his parodic musical pastiche; with Gilbert, he lets the words take over most of the satire and composes in a subtler, and even more delightful, vein.

Prokofiev was one of a number of twentieth-century composers of art music who also devoted a significant amount of time to composing for the cinema. The eight films for which he composed scores were met with varying degrees of success, from the celebrated fame of Aleksandr Nevsky to the frustrated productions of lesser-known films such as The Queen of Spades and Tonya. Sergei Eisensteinís colossal trilogy Ivan the Terrible, for which Prokofiev composed his final film score, was met with both extremes: Although part one of the film was released in January of 1945 to great critical acclaim, the second part was attacked during production for political reasons, even to the extreme of attracting criticism from Stalin himself. Part two would not appear in theaters until 1958, long after Prokofiev and Eisenstein were gone, and part three was never produced.

The composers of these overtures — what today we would call suites — range from the world-famous George Frideric Handel to the moderately well-known Reinhard Keiser to the virtually unknown Johann Christian Schieferdecker. The works represented here also cover a range of dates: 1693 for the Ouverture no. 4 by Philipp Heinrich Erlebach to 1726 for the Suite ìLudovicus Piusî by Georg Caspar Sch¸rmann (1672/3-1751), neither of whom have made a noticeable dent in the performance repertoire of todayís early-music groups.