Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable paved the way for major works by Meyerbeer himself, Halévy, Verdi, Wagner (in German), Saint-Saëns, Massenet, and others — and this splendid performance shows why.
Ralph P. Locke
Opera Album Review: A Major Baroque Opera in English Receives a Stylish Recording
Aside from English pronunciation issues, the singers put over this remarkably polished and attractive opera by one of England’s great seventeenth-century composers with great panache, matching the superb instrumentalists.
Opera Album Review: A Marvelous New Recording of Rossini’s “The Silken Ladder”– at a Bargain Price
Rossini’s one-act opera from 1812 rings fresh changes on a host of comic-opera clichés.
Opera Album Review: Can Conductors Compose Well? Consider Mahler, Bernstein, and Now Antal Doráti
This world-premiere recording of a powerfully compelling opera, based on a play by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, is revelatory.
Opera Album Review: Meyerbeer’s Comic Opera about Peter the Great, A Welcome Return
This re-release of a superb recording of a major Meyerbeer opera reminds us what treasures are available to opera companies (and college opera programs) willing to step beyond the well-trodden path.
Classical Music Feature: “Best of 2022” — Unusual Operas Plus Some Songs, Choral, and Instrumental CDs
Here’s my list of two dozen superlative operatic offerings of wildly differing kinds, plus some notable non-operatic offerings.
Opera Album Review: A Powerful New Recording of an Opera from the Terezin Concentration Camp
I know no more thoughtful disquisition, for the opera stage, on basic questions of life, death, war, love, power, and resistance.
Opera Album Review: Odyssey Opera’s Invaluable World-Premiere Recording of Saint-Saëns’s Complete “Henry VIII”
Gil Rose’s team, headed by an incandescent Ellie Dehn as Catherine of Aragon, should help bring this major work back to the world’s opera-house stages.
Opera Preview: A Rachmaninoff Triple-Header!
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 Album Review: Richard Flury, A Swiss Composer You Should Know About
A world-premiere recording of Richard Flury’s fascinating 1935 opera about love, deceit, and the possibility of forgiveness.