With the furor attendant to the multi-lateral attribution of the newly recorded pasticcio opera Andromeda Liberata, there is still a very fine and tasty all-genuine Antonio Vivaldi disc that may well get lost in the shuffle, namely Patrizia Ciofi's Virgin Veritas disc of Vivaldi's Motets with Europa Galante under Fabio Biondi. A motet was not the ...
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 ...
Diva is an entertaining and attractively packaged compilation of Angela Gheorghiu's EMI recordings made between 1996 and 2002. All of the selections have appeared on previous releases, but some of them only in the context of complete operas. As a one-disc snapshot of Gheorghiu's career so far, Diva does pretty well, and it would make a good first ...
Even hard-core Vivaldians will not be blamed for being a little mystified by the appearance on disc of the opera Bajazet, here recorded for the first time on Virgin Classics. A cursory glance at Antonio Vivaldi's worklist in Grove's will not make its pedigree readily apparent, but closer inspection reveals that it is given as an alternate title to ...
No matter how many times you've heard Le nozze di Figaro, you owe it to yourself to hear this Le nozze di Figaro. It is fresh and funny and silly and moving and enchanting and as wise and as knowing as the work itself. The singers are the ideal kind of opera singers who make you forget they're singing because their acting is so good and their ...
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 ...
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 ...
Maybe you've wondered about whether this could work. What happens if you drop modern operatic stars into early music? Specifically, into early music as performed by a group with such an unerring way of making seventeenth century music come alive as Le Concert d'Astrée and its conductor, Emmanuelle Haïm? Would the forces clash? Would the style ...
There are folks out there who never care to attend another Measure for Measure, who never care to watch another Modern Times, and who never care to hear another Le Nozze di Figaro because to them, comedy is obviously a lesser art form than tragedy. To them one can only say: "too bad!" because as this immensely musical and enormously humorous ...
After almost 400 years, you might think Monteverdi's L'Orfeo would have lost its luster. But in the right hands it can still be deeply exciting, allowing you to relive the birth of an electric and emotionally charged new art form. Emmanuelle Haïm's new L'Orfeo, starring Ian Bostridge, is that kind of experience. It combines truly electric ...
Cherubini's Médée, with a French libretto, received its premiere in Paris in 1797. Although the subject is grimly tragic, it was classified, like Carmen, as an opéra comique because it contained spoken dialogue. The opera was not hugely successful and had a spotty performance history until it became a vehicle for Maria Callas in the 1950s and ...
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 ...
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