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 {…}
When in 1963 Maria Callas devoted her season to the restrictive duties of recording a Prêtre-led recital for EMI, as well as a tour of concerts in, among others, Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Stuttgart, she had not performed a full opera in well over a year. Indeed, her infamous liaison with Onassis and perhaps the onset of a vocal crisis are {…}
After last year’s release of Donizetti’s “Il Paria” it is now the turn of Leoncavallo’s “Zingari” to be featured in a flawlessly produced recording by Opera Rara and its artistic director, Carlo Rizzi, at the helm of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. “Zingari” is the British label’s second dive into the veristic treasure-trove of Leoncavallo’s musical oeuvre and, as such, a {…}
Senesino: brilliant, noble, incomparable, dignified, and boasting a superb technique that allowed the world famous castrato to have impeccable diction coupled with just as formidable breath control… Sheer endless is the series of superlatives with which this multifaceted artist has been credited. Not to mention the adventurous, sometimes stormy and humorous episodes which, for more than three centuries, have cemented {…}
It is a very rare and no less fortunate occurrence for two of the leading sopranos in America to release, within months from each other, their respective take on one of the most dangerously underestimated roles in all of opera: Violetta Valéry for whom, so the saying goes, three voices are needed to match the transition from the melismatic first {…}
It is something of a paradox that the proverbial dearth of tenors coexists with the announcement, in regular intervals, of some new vocal phenomenon which, after a solo recital or two, the recording industry decides to “crown before they are king” – to loosely and no less cynically paraphrase a famous saying by Mascagni. Yet too many are the instances {…}