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 ...
Haydn's Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze (The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross) is unique in his output. Commissioned in 1785 as an orchestral work for Good Friday by a church in Cádiz, Spain, it posed Haydn considerable problems as he tried to reconcile the general structural principles of the Classical era with a ...
Naïve continues its admirable series of complete recordings of Vivaldi's operas with Atenaide, an opera seria that was not successful at its 1728 premiere, and received no further performances during the composer's lifetime. This recording was made as a result of the first modern production, which was presented in the same Florentine theater in ...
Back in the nineteenth century, humorist Edward Lear wrote in his Nonsense Alphabet the following verse for the letter "X:" "X was King Xerxes, whom Papa much wished to know; but this he could not do, because Xerxes died long ago." Much of the same condition can be applied to George Frideric Handel's 1738 opera about Xerxes, properly referred to ...
With this set of 12 cantatas, a few of them quite short, Dutch historical-instrument conductor Ton Koopman approaches the end of his monumental traversal of the complete Bach cantata corpus. The cantatas here mostly date from the last two decades of Bach's life. By this time Bach had cantatas from earlier cycles ready for most occasions pertaining ...
Just when you think that Ton Koopman's magnificent cycle of the complete cantatas of Bach can't get any better, on the last disc of the last volume, it does with a reconstruction of Bach's fragmentary Cantata 193 Ihr Tore zu Zion by Koopman himself. After 19 volumes of three discs apiece, Koopman has proved himself to be perhaps the current ...
Brand new Bach! What more does anyone need to hear? Discovered in 2005, the strophic aria Alles mit Gott und nicht ohn' ihn (All things with God and nothing without Him) for soprano with a continuo of lute, organ, and bass, plus a ritornello of two violins and viola, is gloriously ripe Bach from 1713 written for the 52nd birthday of his patron, ...
The 22nd and final volume in Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir's series of recordings of Bach's cantatas includes two of his final Lutheran cantatas, all four of his short Catholic masses based on movements taken from earlier cantatas, and an early secular version of one of the sacred cantatas plus arrangements of two ...
Naïve's Aria d'Opera dal fondo Foà 28 gathers a number of singers in performances of pieces taken from the National Library of Turin's Vivaldi manuscript identified by its shelfmark as "Foà 28." This manuscript, assembled by Antonio Vivaldi himself, is a collection of 47 arias and ensemble pieces taken from various operas; it is so obscure that ...
Handel: Opera Seria is the third solo recital disc to come from soprano Sandrine Piau on Naïve Classique. In this instance, Piau is taking on the opera arias of ye big, bald, and perpetually peruked master of musicke, George Frideric Handel. Here Piau receives the sumptuous support of Les Talens Lyriques, led with expertise and good tempo choices ...
Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676) was a worthy successor to Monteverdi on the Venetian musical scene, and while his operas may not sustain the level of exalted musical inspiration and psychological depth of Monteverdi's, they come close enough to fully deserve the recognition they are beginning to receive. Like Monteverdi, Cavalli was a master ...
Mozart's "Great Mass" in C minor, K. 427, has traditionally been given lush performances that follow from its nickname, presumably attached during the Romantic era. This fragmentary work juxtaposes expansive, operatic arias with one of the first large-scale results of the experimentation with Baroque-style counterpoint that occupied Mozart during ...
Despite the cheesy cover design, this is a compilation that starts out with a big advantage: it offers a consistent musical point of view. The various singers, choirs, and orchestras are conducted by Michel Corboz, a veteran Swiss-born musician who has been active in Lausanne and in Lisbon, Portugal, and whose choruses have spawned an impressive ...
It's not surprising that when Frank Martin, one of the twentieth century's most devout composers, began a work based on the legend of Tristan and Iseult, he turned not to Thomas Malory's Le morte d'Arthur or to Wagner's source, Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan, both of which depict the lovers as totally abandoned to their passion, but to Joseph ...
How wonderful it must be to be Ton Koopman. Not only is he capable of playing every Baroque keyboard instrument at a virtuoso level, but he is recording the complete Cantatas of Bach with his own handpicked singers and instrumentalists with Koopman himself providing the keyboard continuo. In other words, Koopman gets to know one of the greatest ...
Just how to arrange Johann Sebastian Bach's cantatas for purposes of recording is always a daunting question -- to organize a complete cantata project by BWV number works the least well of all possible options. If J.S. Bach: Cantatas, Vol. 17, gives any indication of what Ton Koopman has in mind, it appears to be historical context rather than ...
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