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Opera

Listening During Covid, Part 11: Making Classical Music New in All Kinds of Ways

Two exquisite sopranos bring us refreshing songs, arias, and cantatas; and a noted Broadway composer and a remarkable Black librettist offer a searing opera about police brutality.

By: Ralph P. Locke Filed Under: Classical Music, Featured, Music, Opera, Review Tagged: Carolyn Sampson, Chen Reiss, Fanny & Felix Mendelssohn: Arias, Gordon Hawkins, Jeanine Tesori, Jewish Chamber Orchestra Munich, Kristian Bezuidenhout, Lieder, Onyx, Overtures, Pentatone, Ralph P. Locke, Tazewell Thompson, Trennung: Songs of Separation

Opera Review: “Champion: An Opera in Jazz” — Fought to a Draw

The cast for this Boston Lyric Opera production was first-rate, and composer Terence Blanchard has worked in a wide variety of jazz styles and shifts gears to keep the score swinging throughout.

By: Con Chapman Filed Under: Classical Music, Featured, Music, Opera, Review Tagged: Boston-Lyric-Opera, Champion: An Opera in Jazz, Con Chapman, Emile Griffith, Michael Cristofer, Terence Blanchard

Opera Album Review: The “Fidelio” Story a Year Before Beethoven’s Opera — and in Italian

A new recording of Ferdinando Paër’s Leonora gives us characters we love (or love to hate) in a fresh light

By: Ralph P. Locke Filed Under: Classical Music, Featured, Music, Opera, Review Tagged: Alessandro de Marchi, CPO, Ferdinando Paër, Leonora, Ralph Locke

Opera Album Review: Saint-Saëns’s Delightful Skewering of the West’s Fantasies of Japan

A major contribution to the recorded repertory, making clear just how effective Saint-Saëns’s The Yellow Princess could be on stage, its nowadays objectionable title repudiated by its varied and nuanced approach to the evocation of the exotic.

By: Ralph P. Locke Filed Under: Featured, Music, Opera, Review Tagged: Bru Zane, La Princesse jaune, Mélodies persanes, Ralph P. Locke, Saint-Saëns, Yellow Princess

Opera Album Review: “Der ferne Klang” Does Its Thing and Does It Amazingly Well

I am beginning to suspect that Franz Schreker was the most effective of the many semi-forgotten opera composers who were active in the German lands during the first decades of the twentieth century (that is, ones less well known today than Strauss, Berg, and Kurt Weill).

By: Ralph P. Locke Filed Under: Featured, Music, Opera, Review Tagged: Der ferne Klang, Franz Schreker, Jennifer Holloway, Oehms, Sebastian Weigle

Opera Album Review: Donizetti’s Teacher Reveals His Own Operatic Mastery in a World-Premiere Recording of “Elena”

This first-rate performance highlights the special attractions of the “half-serious” operatic genre.

By: Ralph P. Locke Filed Under: Featured, Music, Opera, Review Tagged: Elena, Giovanni Simone Mayr, Naxos

Opera Album Review: Marti Epstein’s Resonant, Disturbing “Rumpelstiltskin”

Boston’s 15-year-old Guerilla Opera releases a recording of a fresh take on the old Grimm Brothers tale, to haunting, ritualistic music for four singers and four players.

By: Ralph P. Locke Filed Under: Featured, Music, Opera, Review Tagged: Alina de la Guardia, Guerilla Opera, Marti Epstein, Navona Records, Ralph P. Locke, Rumpelstiltskin

Opera Review: “Iris,” A Powerful Vision of an Imaginary Japan — Six Years Before “Madama Butterfly”

The composer of Cavalleria rusticana brought his sense for characterization and drama to the all-too-plausible tale of a woman victimized by a cad.

By: Ralph P. Locke Filed Under: Featured, Music, Opera, Review Tagged: Berlin Opera Group Chorus and Orchestra, Felix Krieger, Iris, japanese, Japanese dance, Oehms, Pietro Mascagni, Ralph P. Locke

Opera Album Review: The Most Famous French Baroque Opera, Recorded at the Palace of Versailles

Tenor Mathias Vidal shines, as does the period-instrument orchestra, in the rarely heard, trimmer version of 1761, on the Chateau’s own new award-winning label.

By: Ralph P. Locke Filed Under: Classical Music, Featured, Music, Opera, Review Tagged: Ana Quintans, Chateau de Versailles Spectacles, Jean-Philippe Rameau, La Chapelle Harmonique Orchestra, Les Indes galantes, Mathias Vidal, Ralph P. Locke

Opera Album Review: World Premiere Recording of a High-Victorian “Gothic” Opera in English

Edward Loder’s well-crafted Raymond and Agnes (1855) captures much of the eerie glow of its Gothic model, Matthew Lewis’s once scandalous novel, The Monk.

By: Ralph P. Locke Filed Under: Featured, Music, Opera, Review Tagged: Edward Loder, Ralph P. Locke, Raymond & Agnes, Retrospect Opera, Retrospect Opera Chorus, Richard Bonynge, Royal Ballet Sinfonia

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