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 {…}
There is no shortage of good and, sometimes, exceptional recordings of Puccini’s “Turandot,” with aficionados generally swaying between Molinari-Pradelli’s studio release (with Franco Corelli and Birgit Nilsson) and Mehta’s landmark take from 1972. Add to this Franco Ghione and, in excerpts, Barbirolli’s visceral “Turandots” from the pre-war period, and nearly all aspects of Puccini’s swan song – from the ritualistic {…}
The life of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799) reads like an operatic plot set in the decades between the heyday of the Ancien Régime and the interim years of the Directorate. It involved some of France’s most illustrious figures, including Marie-Antoinette, whom he frequented in Versailles after being famously denied the directorship at the Académie Royale de Musique. Similarly, {…}
“These Distances Between Us” – the album’s title, drawn from Jessica Rudman and Aiden Feltkamp’s “The Flight,” reads like a motto to its melancholy set of 21st-century lieder and their description of both solitude and emotional, if not spiritual, longing for wholeness and love. As such, it is a compelling reverberation of the Covid-era zeitgeist that seamlessly integrates Naxos’ catalog {…}
In this installment of Off the Beaten Track, we look at “False We Hope” an experimental and innovative art song album that takes a new and jarring approach to the genre. Ellis Ludwig-Leone’s debut album explores themes of hope, loss, connection, and isolation. It features the Grammy-winning Attacca Quartet and soprano Eliza Bagg, with Ludwig-Leone on piano and synthesizer. Ludwig-Leone’s {…}
For the initiated “L’Amico Fritz” is far more than a somewhat obscure successor to the one-hit wonder of “Cavalleria Rusticana” which, in 1890, had famously crowned Mascagni before he was King (to paraphrase his own words). It rather stands as a vividly orchestrated bucolic clad in the musical jargon of the giovane scuola with its chromatic shifts and tonal ambiguity {…}
In line with their commitment to promote the works of unrecorded and near-forgotten composers, the forces of the British Toccata Music Group have, since 2017, dedicated their attention to Richard Flury, a “Swiss Romantic” (as the title of Chris Walton’s biography reads) and creator of four operas written in truly eclectic and, to some extent, anachronistic fashion. “Der schlimm-heilige Vitalis” {…}
There is no doubt Jonathan Tetelman’s “Arias” is one of the most sensational solo debuts in past months, as it combines the infinitely rich and malleable voice of a dark tenore lirico with a level of artistic maturity that is nothing short of exceptional. A Magisterial Debut Produced for Deutsche Grammophon the album offers a selection of French and mostly {…}