Ralph P. Locke
Moissey Vainberg’s opera powerfully evokes the brutality of Hitler’s extermination camps and the moral ambiguity of postwar Germany.
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I am honestly puzzled by the casualness or, at times, ferocity with which some people nowadays reject classical music as inherently narrow or elitist.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A varied buffet of fresh musical experiences from recent decades and from the mid-1700s.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Arts Commentary: Rich in Creativity — But Nothing Else