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World premiere recording from Supraphon of Bohuslav Martinů What Men Live By (H336,1952-3) with Jiří Bělohlávek and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra from a live performances in 2014, with Martinů's Symphony no 1 (H289, 1942) recorded in 2016. Bělohlávek did much to increase Martinů's profile, so this recording adds to the legacy, and reveals an extremely fine work.
Hector Berlioz Harold en Italie with François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles with Tabea Zimmermann, plus Stéphane Degout in Les Nuits d’été from Hamonia Mundi. This Harold en Italie, op. 16, H 68 (1834) captures the essence of Romantic yearning, expressed in Byron's Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage where the hero rejects convention to seek his destiny in uncharted territory.
Belgian soprano Sophie Karthaüser’s latest song recital is all about the animal kingdom. As in previous recordings of songs by Wolf, Debussy and Poulenc, pianist Eugene Asti is her accompanist in Le Bal des Animaux, a delightful collection of French songs about creatures of all sizes, from flea to elephant and from crayfish to dolphin.
The world premiere recording of Wolfgang Rihm's Requiem-Strophen (2015/2016) with Mariss Jansons conducting the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks with Mojca Erdmann, Anna Prohaska and Hanno Müller-Brachmann, from BR Klassik NEOS.
This is the fifth CD in a series devoted to Ravel’s orchestral works.
This recording of Ravel’s second (and last) one-act opera was made during a concert, and -somewhat daringly - with rather close microphone placement. As it turns out, everything went smoothly.
Halévy’s La reine de Chypre (The Queen of Cyprus) is the 17th opera to be released in the impressively prolific “French Opera” series of recordings produced by the Center for French Romantic Music, a scholarly organization located at the Palazzetto Bru Zane in Venice. (Other recent offerings have included Saint-Saëns’s richly characterized Proserpine, Benjamin Godard’s fascinating Dante--which contains scenes set in Heaven and Hell--and Hérold’s Le pré aux clercs, an opéra-comique that had a particularly long life in the international operatic repertoire.)
This recording on the Gimell label, the seventh of nine in a series by the Tallis Scholars which will document Josquin des Prés’ settings of the Mass (several of these and other settings are of disputed authorship), might be titled ‘Sacred and Profane’, or ‘Heaven and Earth’.
From Decca, Janáček classics with Jiří Bělohlávek conducting the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Given that Bělohlávek died in May 2017, all these recordings are relatively recent, not re-issues, and include performances of two new critical editions of the Glagolitic Mass and the Sinfonietta.
Hans Zender's Schuberts Winterreise is now established in the canon, but this recording with Julian Prégardien and the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie conducted by Robert Reimer is one of the most striking. Proof that new work, like good wine, needs to settle and mature to reveal its riches.
“It produces Effects not only very delightful, but to such as know the contrivance, very wonderful; so that Spectators, not well versed in Opticks, that could see the various Apparitions and Disappearances, the Motions, Changes and Actions, that may this way be presented, would readily believe them super-natural and miraculous.”
From Hyperion, an excellent new Ralph Vaughan Williams A Sea Symphony with Martyn Brabbins conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Symphony Chorus, Elizabeth Llewellyn and Marcus Farnsworth soloists. This follows on from Brabbins’s highly acclaimed Vaughan Williams Symphony no 2 "London" in the rarely heard 1920 version.
The names of Belfast-born soprano Heather Harper and Kansas-born tenor James King may not resonate for younger music lovers, but they sure do for folks my age. Harper was the glowing, nimble soprano in Colin Davis’s renowned 1966 recording of Handel’s Messiah and in Davis’s top-flight recording (ca. 1978) of Britten’s Peter Grimes, featuring Jon Vickers.
Pride and Prejudice, North and South, Antony and Cleopatra, Much Ado About Nothing: literary fiction and drama are strewn with dissembling lovers who display differing degrees of Machiavellian sharpness in matters of amatory strategy. But, there is an artless ingenuousness about Bastien and Bastienne, the eponymous pastoral protagonists of Mozart’s 1768 opera, who pretend not to love in order to seal their shared romantic destiny, but who require a hefty dose of the ‘Magician’ Colas’s conjuring/charlatanry in order to avoid a future of lonely singledom.
In early October 1822, Gioachino Rossini summoned the librettist Gaetano Rossi to a villa (owned by his wife, the soprano Isabella Colbran) in Castenaso, just outside Bologna. Their project: to work on a new opera, which would be premiered during the Carnival in Venice on 3rd February the following year, based on the legend of Queen Semiramide.
Edward Elgar's Sea Pictures are extremely well-known, but many others are also worth hearing. From SOMM recordings, specialists in British repertoire, comes this interesting new collection of other Elgar orchestral songs, sponsored by the Elgar Society.
Mention ‘nineteenth-century English opera’ to most people, and they will immediately think ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’. If they really know their Gilbert and Sullivan, they’ll probably remember that Sullivan always wanted to compose more serious operas, but that Gilbert resisted this, believing they should ‘stick to their last’: light, comic, tuneful satire.
"Orpheus I am!" - An unusual but very well chosen collection of songs, arias and madrigals from the 17th century, featuring Julian Prégardien and Teatro del mondo. Devised by Andreas Küppers, this collection crosses boundaries demonstrating how Italian, German, French and English contemporaries responded to the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice.
We normally think of operas as being serious or comical. But a number of operas-some familiar, others forgotten-are neither of these. Instead, they are fantastical, dealing with such things as the fairy world and sorcerers, or with the world of dreams.
Here is a little-known opera that, like an opera by the Swedish composer Laci Boldemann that I have reviewed here, and like Ravel’s amazing L’enfant et les sortilèges‡, utterly bypasses the usual categories of comic and grand/tragic by cultivating instead the rich realm of fantasy and folk tale.
This is a valuable new recording of a work that is only rarely heard, but was widely influential and wildly popular during the eighteenth century. Philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote both the libretto and the music, with mixed success.
Although it was the first time a composer had written his own libretto, and Rousseau wanted to demonstrate a new method of setting French text to music in the Italian taste, the dramatic pacing leaves much to be desired and the quality of musical composition is uneven. Some of the musical numbers are quite catchy (Colette’s entrance aria “J’ai perdu tout mon bonheur,” for example, was said to have been sung all day long, off-key, by King Louis XV on the day following the first court performance) but others, such as the muddily-scored “Colin revient à sa bergère,” are aimless, weak, and interminable. Charles Burney, who adapted the opera for English-speaking audiences in the 1770s, thought it went on far too long after Colette and Colin find true love and happiness. He was right, but eighteenth-century audiences apparently disagreed: the opera racked up at least 350 performances in its first fifty years.
This production, by rising young performers in the first year of an annual summer opera festival at the Swiss Castle Waldegg (a Baroque jewel, see the pictures at http://www.schloss-waldegg.ch/), is classified as a live performance, but it is almost completely free of the drawbacks of live recordings: no coughing or clapping, no clumping feet or fade-outs as the singers move around, and good balance between singers and orchestra. The CD, co-produced by Swiss Radio DRS 2, contains the complete opera — except for a few verses of one seemingly-endless ensemble number — including recitatives, a pantomime, and a ballet divertissement. An almost-complete libretto is included: the song texts are all there, but Rousseau’s stage directions for the pantomime are not. The lengthy pantomime music sounds pointless unless you know the accompanying story about a village girl, her sweetheart, and a courtier with a diamond necklace, which starts off like a farmer’s-daughter joke and but ends as a mini-morality play.
The singing is pleasing and competent, as is the period-instrument band. The CD booklet is mostly silent about the nature of the orchestra, which is a shame, because the Cantus Firmus Consort overcomes the limitations of their 18th-century instruments rather well, especially the maniacally energetic bassoonist. It appears that for this performance Rousseau’s scoring (doubled or tripled strings, continuo, and pairs of oboes and flutes), has been augmented by horns, tambour and bells. The extra percussion works well, as it is mostly used on instrumental dances, but the raucous horns (probably big-throated German/Bohemian hunting horns, rather than the smaller and more delicate French instrument) are too prominent and too continuous for the early 1750s, when horns were still a novelty in Paris orchestras.
The Soothsayer (Le Devin), Dominik Wörner, is an agreeable and agile baritone, although his German vowels sometimes get the better of his French diction. Michael Feyfar does well for a modern tenor attempting to reproduce the 18th century French haute-contre voice, but he has to use his head voice a bit too often in the upper range, and only sometimes achieves a smooth passage between the two ranges. The star of the show (both in Rousseau’s plot and in this performance) is Colette (soprano Gabriela Bürgler); her tone is natural, light, and silvery, her ornamented repeats in the arias are tasteful, and her rage aria “Si des gallants de la ville” causes sparks to fly.
Beverly Wilcox
University of California, Davis