Here’s my list of two dozen superlative operatic offerings of wildly differing kinds, plus some notable non-operatic offerings.
Ralph P. Locke
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.
Classical Album Review: Short Can Be Good — Three Splendidly Varied One-Act Operas by Lennox Berkeley
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.
Listening During Covid, Part 13 — Music of Brazil and Other Latin American Countries, Religious Consolation from Post-WW II England, and an Operatic Novel
New recordings serve up fine performances of music from Latin America, Brazil, and post-1918 England. And a novel sends its main character back two centuries into Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.
Opera Album Review: Surprise! Michael Haydn — Joseph’s Brother — Proves to Be a Fine Opera Composer
This “serenata” (or chamber opera) with characters from Graeco-Roman mythology receives an elegant world-premiere recording that may bring a major composer out from the shadows.
Opera Album Review: Finally on CD — a Searing ’60s Opera from Russia about the Nazi Era
Moissey Vainberg’s opera powerfully evokes the brutality of Hitler’s extermination camps and the moral ambiguity of postwar Germany.
Listening During Covid, Part 12: Adventures in Ethnic and National Diversity
I am honestly puzzled by the casualness or, at times, ferocity with which some people nowadays reject classical music as inherently narrow or elitist.