Man, BBC Records turned this one around fast! Wigmore Hall Live: Joyce DiDonato reproduces a live Wigmore Hall recital given only January 16, 2006, and the disc is available to the public in August of the same year. Usually even with live recordings it takes longer than that for a release to surface, but BBC apparently put Wigmore Hall Live: Joyce ...
This two-disc set is a sampler of operatic singers from the corporately related Virgin Classics and EMI labels, and like most such samplers it delivers a good deal less than it promises. The marketing is scattershot, for one thing: the two-disc set purports to offer both the "new generation" of singers and "greatest arias" -- whether of these ...
An ambitious German composer newly arrived in England in 1710, it took Handel a decade to suss out what would best tickle English musical tastes, finally settling on Italian serious opera with a dash of English semi-opera. He finally hit the bullseye in 1720 with Radamisto. Played 10 times in its first run, Radamisto was revised for a new cast and ...
Handel wrote Floridante in 1722 for a London audience infatuated with Italian opera. The plot, like that of so many Baroque operas, was taken from ancient history and concerns romantic liaisons thrown into turmoil by political rivalries, in this case between Persia and Tyre. Handel wrote over 50 Italian operas, and it's remarkable that he was ...
Sometimes it's hard to understand why a work as entertaining as Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini isn't more popular. It's brilliantly orchestrated, fun, filled with good tunes and vivid, if stock, characters. But it's too-challenging-by-half for comedy, and too-light-by-half for grand opera, occupying a gray area between the two genres in which only a ...
Robert King may have planned to end his series of recordings of the sacred music of Vivaldi with his grandest and most popular piece of sacred music, the Gloria, RV 589, but he couldn't have planned to end it with Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus, RV 803, because when the series began, the Nisi Dominus had not yet been found hidden among the Galuppi sacred ...
The logistical efforts involved in the making of this album must have been as strenuous as those on the musical side, for this is one of the first real all-star releases to have emerged from the historical-instrument side of the recording catalog. Lovers of vocal music per se may be interested in the dsic purely because it offers a rare ...
It's a pleasure to have such an abundance of excellent recordings of Handel operas that were long virtually unknown or available on CD in a single version, if at all. Alan Curtis' stellar recording of Alcina, which joins a respectable number of very fine recordings of the opera, is remarkable for the supple liveliness of his conducting and the ...
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