By Ralph Locke

The opera repertory is so much richer than what gets staged nowadays; many of the most exciting recordings that came my way are of somewhat or entirely forgotten operas from past eras.

Once again, the past twelve months have seen an outpouring of fascinating and important recordings of operatic and other vocal works (and a few instrumental ones). I have been fortunate to receive copies of many of them for review in this and several other venues (American Record Guide and the Boston Musical Intelligencer).

Sometimes one of my favorites gets nominated for a Grammy. That just happened with Kevin Puts’s opera The Hours, starring Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, and Kelli O’Hara. I hope that the Met will eventually release a video on DVD, to help us appreciate at home the apparently ingenious and sensitive production and acting that complemented the magisterial vocal and orchestral performances heard here, under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The opera is based on the acclaimed novel by Michael Cunningham and the equally accomplished film that starred Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep.

But the Grammy awards surely have all kinds of prejudices (as critics have long objected, with regard to popular music). The result is that many important and even mind-opening recordings go unrecognized. Here is my personal selection of some of the most notable and engaging of the lot.

Many of the most exciting recordings that came my way are of somewhat or entirely forgotten operas from past eras. This includes:

 

• Two French Baroque operas in which I was delighted by the singing of Moroccan-born Hasnaa Bennani and a host of other France-based singers: Mondonville’s Le Carnaval du Parnasse and Destouches’s Télémaque et Calypso (in its 1730 version);

 

• Desmarest’s 1694 Circé (its second recording in two years—this time featuring the Boston Early Music Festival in super form);

 

• Hasse’s 1756 setting of Metastasio’s libretto L’Olimpiade (in a previously unreleased recording from 1992, with Catherine Robbin and Christoph Prégardien), which one can compare and contrast to Cimarosa’s equally adept setting of the same libretto (brilliantly conducted by Christophe Rousset);

 

• A relatively well-known opera by Handel, Poro, re dell’Indie (with Marco Angiolini singing the title role and conducting!);

 

• Two Baroque operas by notable Frenchwomen: Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s Céphale et Procris (with the splendid Reinoud van Mecheln singing and conducting!); and Les Génies ou les Caractères de l’amour, by a singer-composer known only as Mademoiselle Duval;

 

• Telemann’s remarkable mini-opera Ino, for a single singer (here the poised yet gripping Christina Landshamer)—the recording also includes several remarkable Telemann orchestral suites;

 

• Gluck’s final opera Écho et Narcisse (with Adriana González and the exquisite lyric tenor Cyrille Dubois);

 

• Louise Bertin’s remarkably inventive Italian-language opera Fausto (from 1831), featuring Karina Gauvin, Karine Deshayes, and a great new tenor Nico Darmanin;

 

• Meyerbeer’s much-discussed but rarely performed Le Prophète (with great singers: Mané Galoyan, Elizabeth DeShong, and John Osborn);

 

• Rimsky-Korsakov’s fantastical Christmas Eve (brilliantly performed by a top-flight international cast);

 

• Saint-Saëns’s compact and brilliantly effective 1911 Déjanire (with Anaïs Constans and Kate Aldrich);

 

• Massenet’s relatively late but masterful Ariane (featuring Egyptian-born soprano Amina Edris and, again, Kate Aldrich);

 

• Charles Villiers Stanford’s “Romantic comic opera” Shamus O’Brien, brimming over with Irish charm and local color (ably conveyed by a cast of Irish singers, plus a fine English tenor as an interloping English soldier);

 

• And two new operas:

 

• Tobias Picker’s Awakenings, closely based on Dr. Oliver Sacks’s famous book and performed with precision and insight by the Boston-area Odyssey Opera, under the indefatigable Gil Rose;

 

• and

 

• Matt Malsky’s one-act A Dill Pickle, based on a subtly worded 1917 short story by Katherine Mansfield.

 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention two non-operatic vocal recordings:

 

• The trenchant song cycle A Favored Nook, by Eric Nathan, telling the course of the relationship between Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Civil War general who encouraged her

 

• and a two-CD set of songs by LGBTQ+ composers, including Ricky Ian Gordon, Francis Poulenc, Jake Heggie (a short song cycle about Poulenc and his favored interpreter Pierre Bernac), and, from the early twentieth century, Ethel Smyth, performed splendidly by Metropolitan Opera tenor Eric Ferring and his regular accompanist Madeline Lettedahl.

And a BIG box (8 CDs) of pieces, many previously unrecorded, by 21 French women composers active during the nineteenth century or a bit earlier or later. The set is entitled Compositrices: New Light on French Romantic Women Composers, and it is the direct result of much research and advocacy on the part of a scholarly team located at the Palazzetto Bru Zane in Venice, Italy. The performers are uniformly splendid, some of them internationally renowned (e.g., the elegant, sensitive tenor Cyrille Dubois and the fleet-fingered pianist Nathalia Milstein), and the works include ones for full orchestra, for chamber ensemble, for piano four-hands (intended for performance at home, but often quite engaging for the listener as well!), and so on. The 21 composers include familiar names (Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Cécile Chaminade, Louise Farrenc, Pauline Viardot) and ones that will probably be new even to many seasoned classical-music lovers (Marie Jaëll, Clémence de Grandval, Mel Bonis, Charlotte Sohy, Rita Strohl….).

I should also mention a CD that I forgot to include last year: Paul Bowles’s 1953 quasi-opera A Picnic Cantata. It was meant to be performed in concert, presumably with no costumes or props, and no exits and entrances. It feels a lot like Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), but less baffling and thus more touching. The style is very French: rather like, yes, Poulenc, whose music has been a major influence on a lot of American music, not least by gay composers as musicologist Nadine Hubbs pointed out way back in 2004). There was a previous recording (in mono), but modern sound-recording techniques—the work involves the unusual combination of four women singers and two pianists—help convey the nuances of this bubbly yet touching score, making it sound fresh as a daisy.

I don’t often get sent instrumental recordings, but I was delighted by two releases from pianist James Freeman, one with masterworks by Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, and Debussy; the other with the Berg sonata, the Bartók Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm, and Richard Strauss’s “melodrama” (i.e., a piece in which a poem is recited), Enoch Arden. The vivid yet not overbearing speaker of the Tennyson verses in the Strauss work is Marina Sirtis, best known as Counselor Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I end this set of CD recommendations with mention of a piano recital of pieces by Beethoven, Brahms, Percy Grainger, and others inspired by Handel, played winningly by Kenneth Hamilton, and some lute suites by Galileo’s brother Michelangelo Galilei that weave a subtle web under the limber fingers of Richard Kolb, recorded in a nicely resonant nineteenth-century church in rural New England.

And that’s just CDs! I also enjoyed and reviewed some amazing books on quite varied aspects of music: the memoirs of one of America’s greatest living composers, Samuel Adler (born 1918); a fresh and detailed look at the life and recorded legacy of Maria Callas, by researcher and critic Sophia Lambton; a well-edited collection of Edward W. Said’s trenchant writings on four great operas; a deep dive, gloriously illustrated, by Olivia Mattis into George Gershwin’s second passion: collecting modern art; Michael Lasser and Harmon Greenblatt’s insightful evocation of major topics addressed in early- and mid-twentieth-century American popular song; and Jeffrey W. Cupchik’s mind-expanding study of ritualistic musical practices associated with a twelfth-century female Tibetan female Buddha.

In short, it was quite a year for open-minded listeners looking for new experiences—and “old-new” ones, such as those operas by French Baroque composers, including two women, and the 8-CD set of French women composers from later generations!

Top Classical Recordings and Concerts of 2024 from other Arts Fuse critics

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Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His most recent two books are Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (both Cambridge University Press). Both are now available in paperback; the second, also as an e-book. Ralph Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York Arts, Opera Today, and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in major scholarly journals, in Oxford Music Online (Grove Dictionary), and in the program books of major opera houses, e.g., Santa Fe (New Mexico), Wexford (Ireland), Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and the Bavarian State Opera (Munich). He is part of the editorial team behind the wide-ranging open-access periodical Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal. The book series that he founded in the 1990s and still edits, Eastman Studies in Music (University of Rochester Press), has recently published its 200 title, on songs by Robert Schumann.