Classical Music
Two brilliant Israeli pianists have released exceptional musical offerings.
There’s much to admire in the color, character, and urgency of the Minnesotans’ playing and the overall strong direction from conductor Osmo Vänskä.
There are some smartly colored and well-handled performances here, but it’s hard to get past the recording’s unsatisfactory acoustics.
Croatia’s best-known Opera is like The Bartered Bride or a lighter-spirited Porgy and Bess: tuneful, engaging, and stageworthy.
This splendid world-premiere recording proves that, as an opera composer, Johann Simon Mayr had “the whole package.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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