The music of Reiko Füting is far from being easily accessible. If anything, his self-declared aim to “explore the psychological nature of memory” makes the music seem more cryptic or, conversely, less ascribable to a given style or even school. There are in fact a lot of isms: punctualism, serialism, minimalism, etc. which fit under the postmodernist umbrella. Each describe {…}
It has been a while since Decca released a solo recital with Joseph Calleja. “The Magic of Manotvani,” some sort of a crossover, dates from 2020 while his last properly operatic release, “Verdi,” goes all the way back to 2018. Yet the British label has all but forgotten about its spearhead tenor who, with “Ave Maria,” makes a beautifully toned but no less {…}
“The poem with this music is complete.” The final line to composer Shawn E. Okpebholo’s “Romance” reveals, in essence, the method behind Lawrence Brownlee and pianist Kevin J. Miller’s newest release, “Rising,” on Warner Classics: Setting poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to song. With its 29 tracks, the album includes texts from writers such as Langston Hughes, Alice Dunbar Nelson, {…}
Interest in Rossini is famously tied to Maria Callas and the renaissance, both technical and stylistic, of the Belcanto tradition which in the wake of the Divina has inspired as diverse a roster as Teresa Berganza, Marilyn Horne, and Montserrat Caballe to name but a few. Yet in addition to her live performances, her recorded legacy has marked our ear {…}
A meditation on trauma and the fallacies of human memory, “In a Grove” is Christopher Cerrone and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann’s take on a 1922 short story by Japanese author Ryonūsuke Akutagawa. With its limited cast of four soloists (doubling as two characters each) it centers on the murder of Ambrose Raines which Cerrone recounts in four testimonies and three confessions. {…}
A sensational success at London’s Haymarket Theatre (i.e. the Little Theatre in the Hay) and, later, at Covent Garden, John Frederick Lampe’s “The Dragon of Wantley” is a musical satire based on the comic ballad of Knight Moore of Moore Hall and his unlikely defeat of the title-giving serpent by nothing but “a kick on the arse.” The tone, both {…}
Pierre Boulez, eminent connoisseur of Berlioz and his oeuvre, has famously declared the French Romantic a key intermediary between Beethoven and Wagner, that is, respectively, the symphonic and operatic composers par excellence. His “Roméo et Juliette,” written in 1839, is by no means an exception as it combines, so to speak, the best of both worlds: a symphonic enacting of {…}
Scotland, near Edinburgh: Malvina Douglas, while still in mourning, is set to marry Arturo Murray, a staunch Cromwellian and political adversary to her purportedly dead first husband, Giorgio Argyll. Yet at the very height of the celebration, the latter storms in and, to the utmost horror of the bride – who is the only one to recognize him – is {…}
Amid the controversies surrounding her response to the New York Times’ review of “Norma” at the Met, the latest CD release of Sonya Yoncheva has gone strangely unnoticed. It is a shame really, as “The Courtesan” (as it is called) offers a very worthwhile retrospective of some 25 years of professional singing in which she revisits role favorites like Thaïs {…}