Remember the Furtwängler Tristan, the Böhm Tristan, the Kleiber Tristan, or any of the other great Tristans of the past 50 years? If you do, the first thing you remember about them is who did the conducting. Does anyone remember the Suthaus Tristan or the Windgassen Tristan or the Kollo Tristan? No: as important as the singers are, they are not ...
Colin Davis, currently the grand old man of Berlioz conductors, has recorded the French romantic's L'Enfance du Christ an amazing three times: first on L'oiseau-Lyre LPs (not issued on CD), then on Philips (frequently issued on LP and CD), and now on LSO Live (issued on CD with super audio surround sound capabilities). While not perhaps the most ...
It's a measure of Natalie Dessay's entirely appropriate priorities -- of musical and dramatic content over her vanity -- that she looks so ghastly on the cover of her album of scenes and arias from Italian operas. She's dressed as the mad Lucia -- who certainly shouldn't be looking her best, but "as if she has risen from the grave" -- and the ...
Among Franz Schubert's most admired creations, the Mass No. 6 in E flat major, D. 950, stands with the last three piano sonatas, the song cycle Schwanengesang, and the String Quintet in C major as achievements of the first order, hardly what one would expect of an ailing composer in his final year. Yet this great mass for five vocal soloists, ...
Colin Davis has been a tireless supporter of Michael Tippett's music. He has made at least three recordings of A Child of Our Time, one of the composer's most important works: a fine 1975 studio recording for Philips, with the BBC Singers and Orchestra and a stellar group of soloists, including Jessye Norman, Janet Baker, Richard Cassilly, and ...
Billy Budd is above all an ensemble piece, and the release by Virgin, with Daniel Harding conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, admirably succeeds in conveying the intensity of life on the man-of-war. The complexity of the claustrophobic shipboard community is apparent in the strongly etched characterization each singer brings to ...
EMI's 2009 recording of Messiah with the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, led by Stephen Cleobury, marks three anniversaries: the 250th anniversary of Handel's death, the founding of the University of Cambridge 800 years ago, and the death 80 years ago of Arthur Henry Mann. The last two are significant because Mann, as early as 1894, had led ...
It's a measure of Natalie Dessay's entirely appropriate priorities -- of musical and dramatic content over her vanity -- that she looks so ghastly on the cover of her album of scenes and arias from Italian operas. She's dressed as the mad Lucia -- who certainly shouldn't be looking her best, but "as if she has risen from the grave" -- and the ...
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