Welcome back for this week’s look at the latest CD and DVD releases in the opera world.

This week, audiences will get to see a complete recording of Verdi’s early masterpiece with one of the most important baritones of today. There is also a debut album but one of today’s primadonnas and an experimental debut album by an esteemed mezzo. Here is a look:

Verdi: Macbeth

C Major Entertainment releases Verdi’s “Macbeth” from the Gran Teatre del Liceu. The performance from 2016 showcases Ludovic Tézier, Martina Serafin, Saimir Pirgu, and Vitalij Kowaljow in Christof Loy’s production. Giampaolo Bisanti conducts.

Indomita

PENTATONE releases Eleonora Buratto’s solo debut album. In the new album, she pays tribute to the greatest composers and most insurmountable heroines of Italian nineteenth-century opera, together with the Orchestra & Coro dell’Opera Carlo Felice Genova under the baton of Sesto Quatrini.

Buratto performs arias from Bellini’s “Il pirata,” Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena” and “Lucrezia Borgia,” as well as Verdi’s “I due Foscari” and “Aroldo.”

The album contains contributions from mezzo-soprano Irene Savignano, tenor Didier Pieri, and bass Giovanni Battista Parodi.

The Mirage Calls

Bright Shiny Things releases “The Mirage Calls,” an album inspired by Marco Polo’s journey in 1271 from Italy to China from the multi-Grammy-winning Kansas City Chorale led by Artistic Director and Conductor Charles Bruffy.

The album includes music from Mongolia and the Middle East, as well as Chinese composer Se Enkhbayar’s folk-influenced Zeregleent Gobi and three of Chen Yi’s Chinese folk song settings. Its centerpiece is the premiere recording of an elaborate polyphonic mass setting by Spanish music theorist and Vatican choir member Bartolomeo Escobedo that has not been heard for nearly five centuries.

Evolution 

Mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis releases her debut album “Evolution,” via Lexicon Classics. The album is an autobiographical collection recorded over two years in five cities and three countries. It reflects the profound and varied rhythms and influences shaping Bryce-Davis’ life and career. Evolution intertwines operatic elements, dance music, and art song and features music by composers Kamala Sankaram, Rene Orth, Maria Thompson Corley, B. E. Boykin, Jake Landau, and Timothy Amukele, alongside classic melodies by Schubert and Verdi.

In a statement, Bryce-Davis said, “The music that has comforted, devastated, and inspired me over the years has always spanned a variety of styles. Operatic singing rings true inside of me, and this album reflects stories about my family, my roots in Jamaica, my birthplace in Mexico, my upbringing as a Black girl in a small Texas town, and my evolution into a modern opera singer,” said Raehann about the album. “I have been yearning to tell my own stories and share the visions that are meaningful and important to me. With Evolution, sound worlds, cultures and colors collide throughout this kaleidoscope of an autobiography.”

Christopher Tyler Nickel: Mass • Te Deum

Catherine Redding is featured alongside the Vancouver Chamber Choir and Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra under Clyde Mitchell. The recording is a double-bill of Christopher Tyler’s “Mass” and “Te Deum.”

Johann Sebastian Bach: Easter Oratorio • Magnificat

The San Francisco-based Cantata Collective continues its exploration of J.S. Bach’s major choral masterworks with a third album in the ongoing series, pairing the composer’s Easter Oratorio and Magnificat.

Nicholas McGegan conducts soloists Nola Richardson, Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, Thomas Cooley, and Harrison Hintzsche.

Lisepector

Avant-Garde performer Lacy Rose releases her tour-de-force 13-song cycle, “LISPECTOR.” The project is a haunting homage and a musical meditation on the radical life and works of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector. With vocals that evoke Kate Bush and Regina Spektor, Rose crafts an esoteric, cinematic landscape, inspired by opera, movie musicals and alt-rock.  The project has been described as “a rhapsodic reverie on themes of love, existence, time, metamorphosis, and the Divine Feminine; ultimately a woman’s search for herself and meaning in the cosmos.” A private link to the full album is here.

‘LISPECTOR’ is a labor of love and a genuine ‘work of art’. Rose comments, “I know this record is uncategorizable…But I also know it was born from a pure place of writing art as a way to survive. Art as alchemy. Clarice Lispector has a quote that I love and think about often: ‘I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own.’ I did in fact make this album to save my own life, and it has. I hope it can help other people.”

Learn more via the EPK: https://www.lacyrosemusic.com/LISPECTOR

‘The Making of LISPECTOR’ is here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VmvposEfW5s

On May 8th at the Triad Theater in NYC, Rose will celebrate her new album by performing it in its entirety, accompanied by her co-producer and pianist-arranger Isaac Hayward, the Starling Quartet, and special guests. Tickets are available here.

Prior to the concert, on April 11th, Rose will commemorate the album’s day-of-release with a literary event at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Tickets and

Choose Life 

Mona Lyn Reese’s dramatic oratorio melds Jewish and Christian musical traditions, Holocaust survivor accounts, and scripture into a powerful interfaith memorial. Navona Records releases the work featuring the San José Chamber Orchestra & Chorus led by Barbara Day Turner.

Listen to the World

Albany Records releases a choral album by Essential Voices USA and features compositions by Judith Clurman, Matthew Sklar, and Robert Sirota, with texts by William Schermerhorn and Victoria Sirota.

At Which Point

The Crossing, led by conductor Donald Nally releases its 37th album, “At Which Point.”  The album features music by Ayanna Woods, Wang Lu, and Tawnie Olson. New Focus Recordings releases the album.