Opera
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).
Read More
This first-rate performance highlights the special attractions of the “half-serious” operatic genre.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read MoreOpera Review: Arabs on the Operatic Stage — Meyerbeer’s 1814 Comic Opera about the Mysterious ‘East’
Long before the often-prejudicial portrayals of Middle Easterners in Hollywood films, opera composers crafted insightful works from 1001 Nights.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.”
Read More