Opera
A world-premiere recording of Richard Flury’s fascinating 1935 opera about love, deceit, and the possibility of forgiveness.
I was pleased to encounter all three compact operas. Lennox Berkeley seems to me more and more an admirable, indeed lovable composer, and a bit of a chameleon. I like him in all his various colors.
Thankfully, there is no melodramatic black-and-white in James Kallembach’s fascinating 36-minute work, first performed at Boston University by the Lorelei Ensemble in 2017.
This “serenata” (or chamber opera) with characters from Graeco-Roman mythology receives an elegant world-premiere recording that may bring a major composer out from the shadows.
Moissey Vainberg’s opera powerfully evokes the brutality of Hitler’s extermination camps and the moral ambiguity of postwar Germany.
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.
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.
A new recording of Ferdinando Paër’s Leonora gives us characters we love (or love to hate) in a fresh light
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.
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).
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