Benjamin Britten's recordings of his own operas are definitive -- cutting out the interpretive middle man and going straight to the heart of every bar, every scene. For sure, there are better sounding, and in many cases better sung, recordings to be had, especially of the popular works like Peter Grimes and Billy Budd; but none of them are as ...
Malcolm Sargent began serving as an accompanist for amateur productions of Gilbert & Sullivan when he was 14, was musical director for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company from 1926 to 1928, and made complete recordings of several of the operettas with the company, so he clearly had the Gilbert & Sullivan tradition in his blood. During the late '50s and ...
Malcolm Sargent was at one time the musical director of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, so he brings real authority to this 1956 recording of The Mikado, made with the Glyndebourne Festival Chorus and the Pro Arte Orchestra. The clarity of his conducting makes the score sparkle and brings out felicities of orchestration that are too often lost. ...
Decca is to be commended for reissuing the original 1959 recording of Peter Grimes, conducted by the composer and starring Peter Pears, who created the role. There have been a number of subsequent recordings of the opera, but this one, both as a document of the composer's intentions, and on its own musical merit, remains essential for any Britten ...
While baritone Tito Gobbi is primarily known for nineteenth century Italian repertoire, his professional breakthrough came when he sang the Italian premiere of Wozzeck in Rome in 1942 in Italian. This CD preserves a performance of the opera from 1954, made with the RAI Orchestra and Chorus, Rome. Conductor Nino Sanzogno obviously "gets" the opera ...
The live recording of Don Giovanni conducted by Georg Solti at the Royal Opera House in 1962 captures an unusually strong performance featuring an outstanding cast of Mozart veterans, many of them at the height of their powers. Cesare Siepi's Don Giovanni (his debut performance at the house) is a model of easy, youthful arrogance, and vocally he's ...
The live recording of Don Giovanni conducted by Georg Solti at the Royal Opera House in 1962 captures an unusually strong performance featuring an outstanding cast of Mozart veterans, many of them at the height of their powers. Cesare Siepi's Don Giovanni (his debut performance at the house) is a model of easy, youthful arrogance, and vocally he's ...
The live recording of Don Giovanni conducted by Georg Solti at the Royal Opera House in 1962 captures an unusually strong performance, featuring an outstanding cast of Mozart veterans, many of them at the height of their powers. Cesare Siepi's Don Giovanni (his debut performance at the house) is a model of easy, youthful arrogance, and vocally he ...
Welsh composer William Mathias, active in the second half of the twentieth century, wrote in a variety of genres, but is perhaps best known for his choral music written for church performance. In those works, he brings a high level of musical sophistication to a field, which in its history is flooded with more than its fair share of mediocrity. ...
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