Ralph P. Locke
Pietro Auletta’s “L’Orazio” (1737), with substitute arias by other composers, gets a first-rate performance from the renowned Valle d’Itria Festival.
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Ferruccio Busoni’s century-old (or -young) Doktor Faust, inspired by Christopher Marlowe and other pre-Goethe sources, offers a fascinatingly hellish ride.
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A renowned 18th-century master struts his stuff, helped by a skillful young Italian tenor, in an opera first performed in Russia.
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Conductor Jane Glover, marvelous soloists — including superstar countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen — and a superb chorus and orchestra invigorate one of Handel’s last and greatest works.
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Another excellent recording from the “Rossini in Wildbad” festival, with spellbinding vocal performances by Congolese tenor Patrick Kabongo and other powerful young singers.
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Any opera lover will find much to admire and enjoy in this work, based on a famous 27-strophe poem by Friedrich Schiller that Schubert set in its entirety to music.
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I encourage anybody interested in the current state of opera to get to know Michael Dellaira’s “The Leopard”.
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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.
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Samuel Adler, now 96 and still composing, has released an updated version of his rich, entertaining, and sometimes gripping memoir of a life well lived.
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Each of these four works has its own flavor, and lovers of Baroque and Classic-era music will happily scoop up one or more of the recordings.
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