Recently in Recordings
05 Oct 2011
As long as one keeps in mind that historical value is not the same as aesthetic quality, this DVD of early 1960’s live German TV performances of two short Gian Carlo Menotti operas makes for fascinating viewing. »
30 Sep 2011
Love and Death is the name of one of Woody Allen’s earlier films, one built around parodies of Tolstoy and other Russian 19th century literary giants. »
28 Sep 2011
What better way for the long-reigning director of the Vienna State Opera, Ioan Holender, to celebrate the end of his time in the post than with a lengthy gala featuring such stars as Gergely Németi, Roxana Constantinescu, Krassimira Stoyanova, and Keith Ikaia-Purdy? »
28 Sep 2011
Among recent recordings of Britten’s opera Billy Budd, the recent
release conducted by Daniel Harding has much to offer in terms of performance
quality, interpretation, and also the quality of recording. »
23 Sep 2011
Frederick Delius counts among those many composers whose reputations rely on their orchestral efforts, but who dearly wanted to make a lasting contribution to the opera repertory. »
21 Sep 2011
As a rule the celebrated incomplete operas of the repertory eluded completion due to the untimely death of the composer. »
15 Sep 2011
Recorded on 31 October 2007 in the Großer Musikvereinssaal, Vienna, this performance of the Cleveland Orchestra offers a compelling interpretation of the three completed movements of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. »
15 Sep 2011
Opera companies around the world — though relatively few in the United States — cannot resist the temptation to stage Sergei Prokofiev’s first major opera. »
12 Sep 2011
Dialogues des Carmélites is a magnificently anti-operatic opera. »
09 Sep 2011
When the opera opens, a chorus of Trojan is rejoicing that the Greeks have abandoned the war and gone home. »
08 Sep 2011
Hermann Melville wrote a poem called “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the Twelfth Century”: »
06 Sep 2011
Superstitions surround theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy. »
30 Aug 2011
Film biographies of great musicians notoriously exhibit a preference for talking heads nattering on over any music passages. »
27 Aug 2011
The back cover of soprano Nino Machiadze’s debut solo recital from Sony Classical quotes her as describing the disc’s selection of arias as “my world, my successes to date and my hopes for the future.” »
27 Aug 2011
The New York Festival of Song, created and run by Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, dedicates itself to what one might call “American lieder” — art songs by top American composers, classic Broadway, and operatic numbers. »
25 Aug 2011
What is to be done about Armida? »
20 Aug 2011
Gaetano Donizetti is arguably the established opera composer with the highest ratio of failures to successes. »
19 Aug 2011
The chief classical music and opera critic for the Los Angeles Times often criticizes any new operas based on familiar films or classic novels, on the basis of artistic timidity and conservatism. »
14 Aug 2011
It seems very appropriate that a record company called Naïve should elect to release a solo recital for a soprano in her very early 20s. »
13 Aug 2011
Great characters are at the center of all operatic masterpieces, yet opera almost never treads into “operatic biography” territory. »
13 Aug 2011
Gounod you know, but how about Gouvy? »
12 Aug 2011
Bonus features on opera DVDs usually get generic names, such as “Interview” or “Backstage with…” »
12 Aug 2011
A handsome black steed bows its head, eyes open, peering into the darkness around it. »
24 Jun 2011
It can be fascinating, although not necessarily pleasant, to see oneself through the eyes of others. »
16 Jun 2011
The Voltaire maxim usually given in English as “The perfect is the enemy of the good” illuminates the artistic conflicts surrounding many a Wagner production. »
03 Jun 2011
Since 2006, movie cineplexes across the USA have attracted a somewhat unlikely crowd for Saturday matinees, from fall to spring. »
31 May 2011
Pilgrimages, I suspect, derive a degree of their fruitfulness from the slowness of the journey, a pace born of desire or necessity, that removes the journey from the quotidian, brings the purpose into greater focus, and allows for a richer savoring of the experience. »
31 May 2011
Before a single track has been heard, Jordi Savall’s The Forgotten Kingdom impresses with its scale: a three-CD set packaged in a lavish, bound book that contains fifty dense pages of English commentary by nine different authors; adding the multiple translations, beautiful illustrations, and song texts, the book itself luxuriantly sprawls over 500 pages. »
21 May 2011
Philipp Stölzl’s production of Benvenuto Cellini, from the 2007 Salzburg Festival, is weird almost beyond belief. »
20 May 2011
Classic films often receive the honor of a full “restoration,” especially when a new viewing format appears. »
20 May 2011
A quarter century having passed since its premiere, Nixon in China appears to have secured a niche in the opera repertoire, at least of American opera houses. »
23 Mar 2011
With voices of doom predicting the end of the CD format — supposedly to be replaced by downloading — the ancillary art of CD packaging also faces a grim future. »
18 Mar 2011
Vincenzo Bellini’s operas are pure bel canto, with beautiful singing placed above all other considerations. »
12 Mar 2011
A major label release of a new studio recording of a full opera — with the traditional booklet/libretto — wanders onto the scene almost like a lost and lonely unicorn. »
10 Mar 2011
A key measure of operatic star power is the ability to get an obscure work staged — think Joan Sutherland and her run in Massenet’s Esclarmonde, an outlandish wallow in orchestral excess ladled over a libretto of unfathomable goofiness. »
09 Mar 2011
Interesting recordings continue to be produced in the classical music business by smaller labels with particular niche markets. For the label Timpani, their specialty tends to be rarer French repertoire. »
21 Feb 2011
Der zerbrochene Krug is a very short opera by Viktor Ullmann, based on a comedy by Kleist, concerning the fall of man. »
02 Feb 2011
It’s a joy to watch an athlete finding her legs, especially when you
know she’ll achieve her feat superbly, matchlessly, with supreme grace. I
first heard Sutherland sing I Puritani (three times) during the famous
Met run of 1976. »
01 Feb 2011
Issued together, this set includes recordings from two different times, with Mahler’s First Symphony based on performances from 10, 11, and 23 March 2003, and the Ninth from performances between 1 and 3 June 2006. »
31 Jan 2011
Mark Adamo’s opera, based on the famous novel by Louisa May Alcott,
contains one extraordinary scene, a model of how to adapt fiction into opera. »
28 Jan 2011
A recent news report on entertainment technology noted that sales of “regular” DVDs had plummeted in recent years, while the newer Blu-Ray format has seen substantial increases. »
19 Jan 2011
Based on performances give between 3 and 5 November 2005 at Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, the recent release of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is an excellent addition to the discography of this work. »
19 Jan 2011
The Royal Opera at Covent Garden has hit on a way to revitalize a vintage production — hire a fresh cast of virtually unknown singers. »
18 Jan 2011
A recent addition to Valery Gergiev’s Mahler cycle with the London Symphony Orchestra, the SACD recording of the Third Symphony has much to recommend. »
11 Jan 2011
This beautifully realized production of Verdi’s somber masterpiece of political intrigue and father/daughter reconciliation could be a complete success except for one missing element — memorable singing. »
09 Jan 2011
Long-dormant operas sometimes rise to meet a new dawn only to then slink away like the creatures of the night they were doomed to be — seductive but dangerous to approach. »
07 Jan 2011
Wagner and Verdi were born within 6 months of each other. Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen comes from 1840, and could in some ways be Wagner’s Simon Boccanegra. »
31 Dec 2010
Some years ago a witty soul coined the term “jumping the shark” to identify the point at which any long-running television program had exploited all its innate story/character development possibilities and had to resort to ridiculous plot contrivances and spectacle to keep the episodes — and paychecks — coming. »
31 Dec 2010
The Royal Opera at Covent Garden just made something of a splash in international opera news with a star-encrusted revival of an opera once quite popular and yet in recent years — Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur. »
28 Dec 2010
Once a preserve of opulent traditional productions, the summer Salzburg Festival has become a destination for viewing more cutting edge stagings. »
27 Dec 2010
New recordings of classical music don’t appear from the “big labels” very often these days, but those companies have enormous libraries from which to extract selections for compilation discs. »
12 Dec 2010
Johann Adolph Hasse (1699-1783) was arguably the most successful opera composer of the 18th century. Together with his favourite librettist, Pietro Metastasio, Hasse defined the genre of opera seria for an entire generation. »
01 Dec 2010
Philip Glass has achieved a level of success that places him in a very select group of composers of serious music. »
18 Nov 2010
Ondine provides a nice bonus for fans of Karita Mattila in its recent DVD release of a 2006 Helsinki recital with accompanist Martin Katz. »
11 Nov 2010
Our modern globalized perspective makes us alert to the cultural richness of difference, much as it ironically also seems to blur distinctions with ease of access. »
![Kaufmann Wagner [Cover art courtesy of Decca Classics]](http://www.operatoday.com/0028947851899.gif)