Opera
CD recordings keep bringing us unexpected treasures, including chamber works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Samuel Adler, and the (by turns) exquisite and powerful opera Armida by Mozart’s contemporary — who was not his murderer — Antonio Salieri.
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Berkeley’s Nelson reinforces my sense that many fine composers of the twentieth century have largely slid off the map because they did not cater to the obsession of many critics and academics with “the New at all cost.”
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Here’s my list of twenty superlative operatic offerings of different kinds.
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Forget romance. Forget chemistry. Forget star-crossed lovers. At its heart, this Eurydice is concerned with the love between a father and a daughter.
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Peter Heise’s King and Marshal (1878), one of the most-performed Danish operas, is melodic and atmospheric, here sung and played persuasively.
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Halka struts its stuff, impressively, in this new recording with an all-Polish cast conducted by internationally renowned Gabriel Chmura.
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With its wide-ranging textual and musical materials, this “church parable” stands as one of Benjamin Britten’s most striking creations.
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The performance shows generally high competence and comfort, no surprise given that the work is a longtime staple in Croatia: indeed, it is the single most-performed opera in the entire repertory of the Croatian National Theater.
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I don’t recall encountering a recent Baroque recording that is sung with such a fine balance of smoothness and character.
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