Classical Music

Opera Album Review: An Opera by a Scandalous — and Murdered — Composer Is Brought Back to Life

September 12, 2022
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Alessandro Stradella’s Loving and Pretending (caa. 1676) gets a lively, precise, and characterful performance in this world-premiere recording.

Opera Preview: A Rachmaninoff Triple-Header!

September 11, 2022
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Odyssey Opera, and major singers from Ukraine and Russia, bring the great Russian composers’s three one-act operas to Jordan Hall on Sunday, September 25.

Opera Review: Saint-Saëns’s “Phryné” — Short and Witty, and Rediscovered

September 1, 2022
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A one-hour opera that the world forgot — a world-premiere recording of Saint-Saëns’s Phryné.

Opera Album Review: From Fascist Italy — With Love?

August 22, 2022
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An opera from Fascist Italy, Gino Marinuzzi’s Palla de’ Mozzi receives a splendid world-premiere recording. Should you listen despite its pedigree?

Opera Album Review: Richard Flury, A Swiss Composer You Should Know About

August 17, 2022
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A world-premiere recording of Richard Flury’s fascinating 1935 opera about love, deceit, and the possibility of forgiveness.

Classical Album Review: Nico Muhly’s “Stranger” — Searching for Commonalities

August 15, 2022
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Nico Muhly’s writing in Stranger is of a type of post-Minimalism: often pulsing (or undulating) and rhythmically driven, though anything but harmonically simplistic.

Classical Music Album Review: John Corigliano’s “To Music”

August 14, 2022
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A serving of the essence of the music of John Corigliano: a blend of old and new, radical and traditional that has made him such a singular force in American music over the last fifty-plus years.

Classical Album Review: Florence Price’s “Scenes in Tin Can Alley”

August 13, 2022
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Symphonic music wasn’t composer Florence Price’s strong suit. Rather, she was much more at home working in smaller forms or for her own instrument.

Classical Album Review: Conductor Andris Nelsons’s Over-Sweetened “Strauss”

August 12, 2022
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This is a release that showcases many of Andris Nelsons’ strengths, including his strong sensitivity for instrumental colors, blends, and balances. At the same time, it also demonstrates the conductor’s hit-or-miss nature with the core repertoire.

Classical Album Review: Short Can Be Good — Three Splendidly Varied One-Act Operas by Lennox Berkeley

August 3, 2022
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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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