From the time he was a teenager, William Bolcom had dreamed of setting William Blake's epic poem collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience to music -- and eventually he did. But it took over a quarter of a century, from the first completed songs at age 17 in 1956 until 1982 when, as a tenured professor at the University of Michigan at Ann ...
Graham Johnson's Schubert edition covers all of Schubert's secular vocal compositions with piano accompaniment. However, this volume of the Schubert edition slips in a little Schubert pseudo-sacred music: a hymn to the Almighty, a hymn to the Unending, a pagan lamentation, a pantheistic hymn to the evening and another pantheistic hymn to the stars ...
An album made up of three popular works and written by two famous Richards leads to an obvious single question: who is one Donald Runnicles? Since his appointment as music director of the San Francisco Opera in the early '90s, Runnicles has juggled numerous engagements across the globe. Trained as a répétiteur in Germany, his operatic experience ...
Even if one always has doubts about Simon Rattle conducting Mahler -- doubts about his sincerity and his seriousness -- even if one has always questioned his radically wrong tempos in the Second and Fourth and his amazingly uncomprehending interpretations of the Sixth and Seventh -- one has to admit that Rattle has over time gradually been getting ...
Let's say you can only listen to one recording of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Which one would you pick? Would it be the Wilhelm Furtwängler or possibly the Carlos Kleiber? Let's say, however, you can only pick from one of the digital Tristan recordings made around the turn of the millennium -- then which one would you pick? Would it be Antonio ...
Known internationally as an operatic composer, Gian Carlo Menotti is less frequently recognized for his numerous orchestral, chamber, and vocal works, which are generously sampled on this 2005 release from ASV. Even though Menotti displays an impressive technical acumen in his Concerto for violin and orchestra in A minor (1952) and elegant form in ...
Kurt Masur had many competitors but only two real challengers in his 2005 recording of Britten's War Requiem: Britten's 1963 recording and his own 1998 recording. Britten, of course, was also the work's composer, and his powerful, soulful, and overwhelmingly moving recording remains the definitive realization of his intentions. Masur, while not ...
Donald Runnicles is clearly one of the leading conductors of his generation. Under his leadership, the San Francisco Opera has become one of America's premier opera companies. His performances with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and the Atlanta Symphony are rapturously received and ecstatically reviewed. His appearances with the Vienna State Opera ...
If, in the 20 years spent recording Mahler's 10 symphonies plus his symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde and symphonic oratorio Das Klagende Lied, Simon Rattle was at first determined to deliver performances contradicting accepted standards and at the end equally determined to deliver performances conforming to accepted standards, he ...
The vocal performances on this disc of highlights from Charles Mackerras' reading of Don Giovanni, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra & Chorus, are not consistently strong enough to make this a particularly competitive version. Several roles are very well taken. Bo Skovhus makes a memorably charismatic and roguish Don Giovanni, with the dramatic ...
Barber fans will welcome this new recording of Vanessa, which joins an aging original-cast production from the 1950s, and a budget version on Naxos, as only the third recording made to date. It is an excellent performance that rivals the RCA original for artistic quality (and far surpasses it in clarity and richness of sound), and could easily be ...
It's true that American soprano Christine Brewer has the sort of voice Strauss would have loved -- richly ripe and warmly sensual with a full but intimate tone, a lush but controlled vibrato, and a commanding, not to say domineering, manner -- and it's true that English pianist Roger Vignoles is an admirable accompanist who has long known his way ...
An album made up of three popular works and written by two famous Richards leads to an obvious single question: who is one Donald Runnicles? Since his appointment as music director of the San Francisco Opera in the early '90s, Runnicles has juggled numerous engagements across the globe. Trained as a répétiteur in Germany, his operatic experience ...
Charles Mackerras' 1995 recording of Don Giovanni with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra & Chorus is intriguing largely because it includes both the original Prague version and the revised Vienna version of the middle of the second act. The Prague version ends the second CD and the Vienna version opens the third CD, making it easy for listeners to ...
Henryk Górecki's Third Symphony, entitled "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," did not find its due appreciation until some 15 years after its 1977 premiere in France. The groundbreaking (and still gold standard) recording of the symphony made by soprano Dawn Upshaw with David Zinman and the London Sinfonietta rocketed to the top of classical and ...
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