Opera
An opera from Fascist Italy, Gino Marinuzzi’s Palla de’ Mozzi receives a splendid world-premiere recording. Should you listen despite its pedigree?
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A world-premiere recording of Richard Flury’s fascinating 1935 opera about love, deceit, and the possibility of forgiveness.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Moissey Vainberg’s opera powerfully evokes the brutality of Hitler’s extermination camps and the moral ambiguity of postwar Germany.
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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.
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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.
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A new recording of Ferdinando Paër’s Leonora gives us characters we love (or love to hate) in a fresh light
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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.
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