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.
Opera
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.