Following the trend of singers releasing recitals based on the repertoire of great performers of previous centuries -- Cecilia Bartoli's tribute to Maria Malibran and Juan Diego Flórez's to Giovanni Battista Rubini, for instance -- countertenor Philippe Jaroussky has devoted a CD to the repertoire of eighteenth century castrato Giovanni Carestini, ...
Wild, passionate, and over in less than an hour, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas is one of the greatest operas ever composed and it has received some of the greatest performances of any opera ever recorded. And while some of them have been sung with more refinement or more fervor, few can match this performance with Susan Graham as Dido and Ian ...
Two decades ago Handel's early Italian-language cantatas were little known, but sopranos have discovered that they provide a top-level vocal workout while offering more than a hint of the mature Handel's genius. This disc by French singer Natalie Dessay, one of the hottest sopranos on the scene, is going to be hard to beat. Dessay shares the ...
Handel wrote the secular oratorio Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The triumph of Time and of Enlightenment) to the text of one of his patrons, Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, in Rome in 1707. The libretto, which doesn't stand up to close logical scrutiny, centers on Beauty, who must choose between self-indulgent Pleasure and the austerity of ...
First things first: if you're seeing a picture of this disc on the site of an online retailer, be aware that it contains the Mass in C minor, K. 427, not the "Mass in C," promised by the cover, which would more likely be the "Coronation" Mass in C major, K. 337. It is always a shame when designers are given power of diktat over content editors. ...
Maybe you've wondered about whether this could work. What happens if you drop modern operatic stars into early music? Specifically, into early music as performed by a group with such an unerring way of making seventeenth century music come alive as Le Concert d'Astrée and its conductor, Emmanuelle Haïm? Would the forces clash? Would the style ...
First things first: if you're seeing a picture of this disc on the site of an online retailer, be aware that it contains the Mass in C minor, K. 427, not the "Mass in C," promised by the cover, which would more likely be the "Coronation" Mass in C major, K. 337. It is always a shame when designers are given power of diktat over content editors. ...
After almost 400 years, you might think Monteverdi's L'Orfeo would have lost its luster. But in the right hands it can still be deeply exciting, allowing you to relive the birth of an electric and emotionally charged new art form. Emmanuelle Haïm's new L'Orfeo, starring Ian Bostridge, is that kind of experience. It combines truly electric ...
The nuanced and lively playing Emmanuelle Haïm draws from Le Concert d'Astrée is the strongest element in this recording of Bach's Magnificat and Handel's Dixit Dominus. Its colorful, briskly articulated performance is a delight throughout, but the singing of the soloists and chorus lacks the same consistency. The chorus' sound is somewhat murky ...
The logistical efforts involved in the making of this album must have been as strenuous as those on the musical side, for this is one of the first real all-star releases to have emerged from the historical-instrument side of the recording catalog. Lovers of vocal music per se may be interested in the dsic purely because it offers a rare ...
Nothing quite says "Bach" like the image of a woman lying face-up on some pavement, wearing a strapless black dress. Or so Natalie Dessay would have us believe. She also dedicates her new album of Bach cantatas to Martin Luther King. Welcome to the woolly world of Natalie Dessay singing Bach, accompanied by the fearless period-instrument group Le ...
This is an excellent recording of Handel's "other" Acis -- an Italian cantata he composed during a visit to Naples ten years before he wrote the more famous English masque Acis and Galatea. Emmanuelle Haïm and Le Concert d'Astrée play with pathos, imagination, and impeccable style, never forgetting that, in a work for such intimate forces, ...
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