I am honestly puzzled by the casualness or, at times, ferocity with which some people nowadays reject classical music as inherently narrow or elitist.
Ralph P. Locke
Listening During Covid, Part 11: Making Classical Music New in All Kinds of Ways
Two exquisite sopranos bring us refreshing songs, arias, and cantatas; and a noted Broadway composer and a remarkable Black librettist offer a searing opera about police brutality.
“Listening During Covid, Part 10”: So Much Amazing Music to Discover!
The record companies are bringing us unsuspected marvels from past and present that we might otherwise never hear, from astonishing Handel-era works and brand-new American pieces to elegantly performed guitar sonatas from 19th Century Vienna.
Opera Album Review: Saint-Saëns’s Delightful Skewering of the West’s Fantasies of Japan
A major contribution to the recorded repertory, making clear just how effective Saint-Saëns’s The Yellow Princess could be on stage, its nowadays objectionable title repudiated by its varied and nuanced approach to the evocation of the exotic.
Listening During Covid, Part 9: Intriguing New Works and New-Sounding C. P. E. Bach
A varied buffet of fresh musical experiences from recent decades and from the mid-1700s.
Opera Album Review: Marti Epstein’s Resonant, Disturbing “Rumpelstiltskin”
Boston’s 15-year-old Guerilla Opera releases a recording of a fresh take on the old Grimm Brothers tale, to haunting, ritualistic music for four singers and four players.
Opera Review: “Iris,” A Powerful Vision of an Imaginary Japan — Six Years Before “Madama Butterfly”
The composer of Cavalleria rusticana brought his sense for characterization and drama to the all-too-plausible tale of a woman victimized by a cad.
Opera Album Review: The Most Famous French Baroque Opera, Recorded at the Palace of Versailles
Tenor Mathias Vidal shines, as does the period-instrument orchestra, in the rarely heard, trimmer version of 1761, on the Chateau’s own new award-winning label.
Opera Album Review: World Premiere Recording of a High-Victorian “Gothic” Opera in English
Edward Loder’s well-crafted Raymond and Agnes (1855) captures much of the eerie glow of its Gothic model, Matthew Lewis’s once scandalous novel, The Monk.
Listening During Covid, Part 8: A Remarkable Black British Composer, an American Master, and an Award-Winning Salieri Premiere
CD recordings keep bringing us unexpected treasures, including chamber works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Samuel Adler, and the (by turns) exquisite and powerful opera Armida by Mozart’s contemporary — who was not his murderer — Antonio Salieri.