Opera
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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This new recording would be a great, and inexpensive, way to enter the sound world of Rossini’s mature operas.
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Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s delightful 1906 comic opera, via the first recording of the version heard at the work’s premiere.
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I felt at times that I was listening to the Italian equivalent of a Broadway musical, though a serious rather than jolly one.
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