Classical Music
This splendid world-premiere recording proves that, as an opera composer, Johann Simon Mayr had “the whole package.”
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This joint album from the Jupiter String Quartet and Jasper String Quartet is striking for its backstory but really memorable for its smart program and fine execution.
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World premiere recording of an utterly delicious 1872 comic opera, recorded without spoken dialogue, so you can just revel in the music and the singing.
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Taken together, these four pieces showcase a composer whose handling of the orchestra is expert and whose sense of form, in these works at least, feels unerringly right.
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Philip Glass’s librettist Arthur Yorinks offers his thoughts on whether and how to update an opera as the Boston Lyric Opera releases its revamped and filmed version of The Fall of the House of Usher.
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I may be in quarantine, but music can transport me back to the Middle Ages, or to the court of Catherine the Great of Russia, or, via Donizetti, to an imagined India.
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How do you make filmed opera relevant in the Age of COVID? The BLO isolated the performers from one another and made E.A. Poe’s story the dream of an immigrant child in detention on the US/Mexico border.
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My Father Knew Charles Ives and Harmonielehre make an excellent pairing on the Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s new, all-Adams album led by music director Giancarlo Guerrero.
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The long-forgotten Il paria (1829), a work that Donizetti himself prized more highly than many of his other works, has now been reconstructed by a scholarly team and given a splendid recording.
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Sir Adrian Boult certainly had his ups and downs as a conductor, but these performances showcase him largely at his best.
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Arts Commentary: Rich in Creativity — But Nothing Else