Paul Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, first heard in 1907, once seemed important. Arturo Toscanini conducted the Met premiere in 1911 with Farrar and later arranged some of its music for a 1947 recording with his NBC Symphony.
The economics of the recording companies dictate much that is not ideal. Wagner’s operas were not composed as they were in order to permit the extraction of bleeding chunks, even on those occasions when strophic song forms do occur.
Among the recent recordings of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, Valery Gergiev’s release on the LSO Live label is an excellent addition to the discography of this work.
While not unknown, the songs of Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942) deserve to be heard more frequently.
Recorded on 5 and 6 May 2008 and 17 and 18 January 2009 at the Lisztzentrum (Raiding, Austria), this recent Bridge release makes available the piano-vocal versions of three song cycles by Gustav Mahler, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Rückert-Lieder, and Kindertotenlieder performed by mezzo-soprano Hermine Haselböck, accompanied by Russell Ryan.
Contraltos rarely achieve the acclaim and renown of sopranos. Assigned few leading roles in opera, they are condemned to playing the villain or the grandmother, or to stealing the castrati’s trousers in en travesti roles.
Following their 2011 Decca recording of Striggio’s Mass in 40 Parts (1566), I Fagiolini continue their quest to unearth lost treasures of the High Renaissance and early Baroque, with this collection of world-premiere recordings, ‘reconstructions’ and ‘reconstitutions’ of music by Giovanni and Andrea Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Palestrina, and their less well-known compatriots Viadana, Barbarino and Soriano.
Eternal Echoes is an album of khazones [Jewish cantorial music] for cantorial soloist, solo violin and a blended instrumental ensemble comprising a small orchestra and the Klezmer Conservatory Band.
Michael Tilson Thomas’s recording of Mahler’s Third Symphony is an outstanding contribution to the composer’s discography.
Oliver Knussen burst into British music with an unprecedented flourish. In 1967, the London Symphony Orchestra premiered Knussen’s First Symphony, with István Kertész scheduled to conduct.
Based on performances given in Summer 2010 at the Lucerne Festival, this recording of Beethoven’s Fidelio is an admirable recording that captures the vitality of the work as conducted by Claudio Abbado.
Stanisław Moniuszko (1819-1872) was one of the most popular composers of his day in Poland, and of the many works he wrote for the stage, two are performed from time to time, Halka (1848) and Strazny dwór [The Haunted Manor] (1865).
The Polish alto Jadwiga Rappé is a familiar voice in various stage and concert works, and the recent release of a selection of songs by Stanisław Moniuszko (1819-1872) is an opportunity to hear her performing artsongs.
Originally released on multiple discs in 1981 this reissue on two CDs is a comprehensive collection of art songs by Italian and French composers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
An exciting contribution to the discography of this popular opera, the live performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome from the Festspielhaus at Baden-Baden is a compelling DVD.
Released in late 2011, Deutsche Grammophon’s DVD of the new staging of Berg’s Lulu at the Gran Teatro del Liceu, Barcelona is an excellent contribution to the discography of this fascinating opera.
A recent release by the Metropolitan Opera, this two-disc set makes available on DVD the famous performance of Berg’s Lulu that was broadcast on 20 December 1980 as part of the PBS series “Live from the Met.”
The novels of Sinclair Lewis once shot across the American literary skies like comets, alarming and fascinating readers of that era, but their tails didn’t extend far behind them.
Once the province of only the most dedicated opera fanatics, mid-20th century recordings of privately taped live performances have become more widely available.
Flute players in opera orchestra around the world must look forward to the frequent appearances of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, knowing that while the stage spotlight in the mad scene will be on the soprano, the orchestral spotlight will be on their instrument.
In connection with the joint project by Thomas Hampson and the U.S. Library of Congress to present events about American song and other creativity at venues as varied as Kansas City, Fort Worth, and Carnegie Hall, EMI Classics has released this CD containing tracks from three earlier discs featuring Thomas Hampson.
If you already own these discs, there is nothing new here besides the notes and the program order, but since two of the discs are no longer in the active catalogue, this new release offers a good sampling of the fruits of Hampson’s championship of American art song while providing a souvenir CD for his recital tour.
For Hampson disc collectors wishing to cut to the chase, eight songs are taken from An Old Song Resung, a 1990 recital of “American Concert Songs”, six first appeared on From the Soul, Hampson’s sung and recited 1997 tribute to the poetry of Walt Whitman, and the remaining six are from American Dreamer, a 1992 collection of Stephen Foster songs arranged for his voice and an old-time music ensemble of violin, guitar and piano (this is the disc that is still in the active catalogue). The songs are interspersed, although most of the Whitman songs are heard near or at the end of the program (the exception being Ned Rorem’s “As Adam Early in the Morning”, which opens it). Thus, most of the Stephen Foster songs are in the company of ballads like Haydn Wood’s “Roses of Picardy” (which is actually an English song but was widely sung in the US after World War I) and Walter Damrosch’s catchy, martial setting of Rudyard Kipling’s “Danny Deever”, which was apparently Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite song. Concert songs dominate the middle of the program, with Charles Griffes’ “An Old Song Resung,” telling of a catastrophic shipwreck, echoed just a bit later in the traditional “The E-ri-e Canal”, which humorously uses shipwreck language to tell of an ill-fated canal trip, at the end of which “the crew are all in jail, and I’m the only sea-cook son that’s left to tell the tale.”
Hampson’s powerful and expressive voice brings these songs to life, but, with his extensive experience with German Lieder and other European art song he is equally at home with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s tender “Tomorrow (When you are Gone)”, and John Duke’s slightly spooky “Luke Havergal” (which has been a favorite of mine since I acquired the disc on which it first appeared). Hampson says he began studying American art song in hope of identifying the American Mahler or Schubert, but has come to see in the entire genre a kind of conversation among poets and composers of what it is to be making “America”. Thus, he approaches all the songs with directness and unpretentiousness, which he considers an important quality of American song. So, while Hampson can bring to Leonard Bernstein’s complex “To What You Said” the full artistry with which he approaches Mahler’s songs, he is also fully at home with the fiddle, piano, and backup vocals of long-time “roots music” performers Jay Ungar and Molly Mason as they present arrangements of Stephen Foster’s ballads, in which Hampson sees an attempt to create an American version of Thomas Moore’s Irish ballads. (Foster’s livelier, and possibly more controversial, minstrel songs are not a part of this program, so we hear “Beautiful Dreamer” and “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”, but not “Oh Susannah” or “De Camptown Races”, which figure in instrumental medleys on the American Dreamer disc.)
The program closes with settings of Walt Whitman poems about the Civil War, including songs by Kurt Weill and Charles Naginski, and concluding with “Ethiopia Saluting The Colors,” as set by African-American composer Henry Thacker Burleigh. Nowhere is Hampson’s view of the project of American song more focused than in these songs, in which serious composers of varied ethnic backgrounds set words in which the father of American poetry engages with the fundamental episode in America’s development of its identity as a nation.
Information on American Art song in general and the remaining recitals in the Library of Congress series can be found on Thomas Hampson’s website and that of the Library of Congress.
Barbara Miller