Hungarian composer György Kurtág turned 100 years old this February. He spent his late eighties and early nineties working on his first opera, “Fin de partie” (“Endgame”), based on Samuel Beckett’s play, opened at La Scala in 2018. This was a century and quarter after Verdi’s geriatric masterpiece “Falstaff” premiered at the same fabled theater — an opera he wrote {…}
Decried, derided, dismissed—such was the fate of verismo opera, viewed through the lens of musicological conservatism, that is. Accused of sordid gutter realism, it tended to be overlooked as the declining, or terminal, chapter in the evolution of Italian melodrama: “Last Acts” (2000) and “The Autumn of Italian Opera” (2007) are but two book titles illustrating this bias—in spite of {…}
Sarah Fox has, for decades, been a fixture of English opera — at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden — as well as on disc, in works by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Kenneth Leighton. Yet she also has a well-established track record in the classical repertoire — Mozart, in particular — which Signum Classics celebrates with the release of “Mozart Concert Arias.” {…}
Clément Guérard–aka Clym–stated in his audiophile guide to Wagner that “there is no war of the Rings.” What he meant was that each recording stands as a supreme achievement of its own—irrespective of personal taste, conviction, philosophical leaning, or otherwise. It is a generous form of agnosticism that spares its practitioner the ire of the ever-furious Wagnerian. So be it; {…}
Who was Vatroslav Lisinski (1819–1854)? A composer—and ideologue of Illyrism, the South Slavic campaign against Austrian hegemony; a Croatian nationalist, and—like his Italian counterparts of the Risorgimento—very much a child of his time. He is credited with the first Croatian national opera, “Ljubav i zloba” (“Love and Malice”), and is the namesake of the Zagreb Concert Hall—as was pointed {…}
Yet another “Tosca” — this one captured live at the 2024 edition of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. The production garnered widespread acclaim, not least for its stark pseudo-fascist décor, evocative of today’s authoritarianism worldwide. But how do its musical qualities fare, and do they warrant the release of Naxos’s new CD set? The performance is entrusted to the capable {…}
Mascagni’s “Zanetto” does not fit squarely into any one category. Premiered in 1896, it is a one-act miniature with a late scapigliato sensibility—not unlike Alfredo Catalani’s “La Falce” (1875), or, for that matter, any of the soft-aesthetic, off-the-beaten-path operas of fin-de-siècle Italy. Significantly, Mascagni himself originally dubbed “Zanetto” a scena lirica—an anti-”Cavalleria,” one might say. By all evidence, its storyline {…}
With his latest release, Jonas Kaufmann ventures deep into the little-charted territory of Austro-Hungarian operetta. “Magische Töne” (“Magical Sounds”) is indeed a potpourri of Belle Époque mystique: playful, mischievous, and bittersweet. Its 22 tracks comprise lyrical evergreens like the “Wolgalied” (“Es steht ein Soldat am Wolgastrand”), alongside the rather obscure “Julia” by Paul Abraham, as well as Fred Raymond’s {…}
“I want to fly with the music; we have to swim inside the music,” said Michele Mariotti in 2017, when Lisette Oropesa appeared in a rehearsal video for the Royal Opera House’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.” Fast forward to 2026, and she still sings the “Mad Scene” with unequivocal ease; her voice soars to vertiginous heights before collapsing into the {…}