Whatever your views on the music or the performance, that this recording exists at all is an extraordinary story, and due congratulations must be offered to the hard work and dedication of all involved, in particular of Jennifer Condon. Her “normal” job is as a prompter at the Hamburg Opera, but she has been responsible for editing this previously unpublished work, preparing it for performance, persuading a large and distinguished cast to take part, in some cases without any remuneration, as well as conducting the performance. This shows a commitment to the work that may seem eccentric to the cynical but heroic to others who have laboured in vain on behalf of other similarly neglected works.
 
Peggy Glanville-Hicks was an Australian composer whose teachers included Vaughan Williams, Egon Wellesz and Nadia Boulanger, who was married for a time to Stanley Bate, another neglected composer, and who spent twenty years in New York before moving to Greece and finally back to Australia. Her other works include the opera The Transposed Heads, commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra and recorded by them in the 1950s and in 1984 by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. I have listened many times to both recordings with increasing pleasure so that I have been very eager to hear the present discs.
 
Sappho is a setting of an adaptation by the composer of a verse play by Lawrence Durrell. It tells of the Lesbian (but not lesbian) poet Sappho in her latter years when she was married to a wealthy local merchant, Kreon. The various scenes show her with the twin brothers, Pittakos and Phaon, with her tutor, Minos, and with Diomedes, a drunken poet. Towards the end she is exiled to Corinth on a false charge of incest. Her final monologue, the only part of the opera to have been publicly performed, is the clear climax of the opera, with Sappho accepting the impermanence of personal relationships as well as of her own life. It mirrors similar scenes at the end of operas by Strauss and Janácek, albeit that it is very different in its musical style. That style derives to a great degree from the composer’s attempt to reduce the importance of harmony in music, and to throw the emphasis instead on texture and tone, melody and heterophony. The result may seem a little bland at first but the listener soon adjusts to the composer’s very individual style.
 
A quick glance at the cast list shows several distinguished Wagnerian singers. Very surprisingly that appears to have been a necessity due to the weight of some of the orchestration. The conductor’s note indicates that she believes that with adjustment to dynamics and some of the orchestration it could be performed on a smaller scale, and I have to say that this would be welcome. In fact the ideal might be to retain the Wagner-sized voices but allow them to sing at somewhat less than full power. That would permit a more nuanced approach to performance and a more natural delivery of the, admittedly somewhat flowery, text. I am full of admiration for the cast here, who have taken on a major new work with obvious enthusiasm, but it has to be admitted that for much of the time there is a lack of any attempt at light or shade in their singing. The many singers for whom English is not their first language cope well but it cannot be said that the result sounds idiomatic. Admittedly the results in the case of the English-speaking artists are not all that much better, and although I attempted to follow what was being sung without it after a while I found myself wholly dependent on the printed libretto to understand what was being said or even who was saying it.
 
Sappho is by no means as immediately attractive as is The Transposed Heads, partly due to an apparent preponderance of slow or slowish music, but enough is revealed through this very welcome issue to suggest that subject to the preparation of a performance edition that would make it kinder to singers and to a greater familiarity with the work it would certainly merit stage performance. In the meantime we should once again thank Jennifer Condon for her untiring efforts to make it possible to hear the work and all the singers and players who helped her in this. Congratulations also to Toccata Classics whose presentation of the issue, with essays on the work, the edition, Durrell and Sappho, together with the full libretto, does all that could be done to help the listener and encourage understanding of this important discovery.
 
-- John Sheppard, MusicWeb International

Be prepared to be mesmerized by many sections of this score. You can easily lose yourself in this complex of glittering broken chords, and what a wrench it is when the music finally comes to a halt.

Not even CD can quite simulate the vast timespan of Einstein on the beach, the seemingly endless wall of Glass that apparently faces listeners during live performances of this extraordinary four-hour theatre piece. Disc changes, fades at the ends of tracks and compressions of material apart, however, this recording does at least offer a glimpse of the work to those of us who have yet to experience (or may never have the chance to witness) Philip Glass's first opera fully staged. Needless to say, four CDs give a far better sense of the work's sheer scale and continuity than do the eight (sometimes rather short) sides of the original LP issue.

Majestic and bewitching as so much of it is, there are certain drawbacks to hearing the music purely on its own. As Max Harrison explained in his review of the LP, the score is not narrative in conventional operatic terms. Blocks of relatively unvarying music that range from 4 to 24 minutes in duration do no more than suggest a prevailing mood, sometimes with the aid of a spoken text that may (or may not) be obliquely related to the stage action. Home listeners of course lack the visual element that explains what it's all about. Even the generous spread of illustrations provided with the LPs (not reproduced in the CD booklet) give only the vaguest impression of Robert Wilson's stage spectacle and, like MH, I wonder whether this divorce of music from image sometimes seriously reduces the impact oIGlass's carefully calculated effects. Judged purely as music, for example, the sheer tedium of "Trial" (Act I scene 2) becomes almost unbearable; in the theatre, does its relationship with the stage action result in something more engaging?

Don't expect, then, to be able to make complete sense of everything in this piece. But do be prepared to be charmed, even mesmerized by many sections of the score. The scintillating, energetic swirl of "Dance 1" (Act 2 scene I) is certainly no endurance test. Quite the opposite: you can easily lose yourself in this complex of glittering broken chords, and what a wrench it is when the music finally comes to a halt. "Building/Train" (Act 2 scene I) is, unambiguously, deeply disturbing music, whatever visual imagery it was designed to reinforce. Passages such as these stand so successfully on their own that one might almost forget their context and cherish them instead as autonomous works. Perhaps CBS should consider issuing a single CD of highlights.

-- Gramophone [9/1986]

A thoughtful performance of Mussorgsky's masterpiece, with Ghiaurov conveying a dignified and reflective portrait of Tsar Boris.

Mussorgsky's original Boris Godunov, without benefit of Rimsky-Korsakov, has become more or less accepted now, for recordings as well as on the stage; though that begs the question of what is the original. David Lloyd-Jones, in his authoritative edition, uses the word "initial" for the 1869 version which was turned down by the St Petersburg Imperial Theatres, and "definitive" for the work's enlargement by the Polish act and Revolutionary scene (with the St Basil's scene dropped) for the 1874 production. As is now common, this new recording includes both the Revolutionary and the St Basil's scenes. The scoring is the original, of course, though the singers generally take (insignificant) variants which suggest they are using the 1874 Bessel vocal score.

The performance is a thoughtful one, sometimes with rather too much thought with Tchakarov, and not enough raw energy. Fortunately the best is at the centre, with Ghiaurov's reflective, melancholy Tsar Boris. His first words, "Skorbit dusha" ("My soul is sad"), suggest the burdened sinner, much as Boris Christoff does but with a deeper tinge of sorrow; and this note runs through his performance. He is very tender with his son Fyodor (sympathetically sung by Rossitza Troeva-Mircheva), and plays the histrionics of the hallucination scene down. The death scene, too, is sung simply and well, with few extra effects (a sob early on before the word "umyrayu"—"I am dying"—and a final groan). The music does not need them: there is no greater demonstration of what all that 'realism' meant to the Russians than the melodic line as it steadily loses its human warmth and disintegrates into oblivion. It is not a performance that attempts the rugged majesty of Boris Christoff, and if it loses something in dramatic impetus by that much, it conveys musically and with much dignity a portrait of Mussorgsky's bowed Tsar. Ghiaurov is in places a little free with the rhythm, which does not matter much, and changes the odd word (not surprisingly substituting "k nam" for "vsye" on the high F where Mussorgsky inconsiderately placed it).

Christoff, on his EMI recording under Clutyens, sang both Pimen and Boris; but though it was an impressive tour de force, the idea is not really advisable. Here, there is a good contrast with the graver voice of Nicola Ghiuselev, who is a sombre but by no means ascetic Pimen, remembering his youthful indiscretions with penitence but, for once, as if they could actually have happened. He delivers the final address to the Boyars superbly.

The remainder of the cast give varying performances. Stefka Mineva is an unseductive Marina, her powerful tone and pronounced wobble standing up better to the tense exchanges with Boris Martinovich's alarming Rangoni than to the love duet with Grigory, or the False Dmitry; he is sung, with a skilful sense of a man possessed, by Mikhail Svetlev, giving a well-sustained performance. There is a plausible villain of Shuisky from Josef Frank. But the more extrovert scenes suffer from a lack of exuberance. The crowd at the start is hustled along by a policeman of implausible gentleness; Stefka Popangelova's Nurse does not sound as if she is enjoying her romps with the children very much; Penka Dilova's Hostess is rather tame with her song about the grey drake; and as Varlaam, Dimiter Petkov has clearly been sustaining himself with nothing stronger than lemonade as he clambers up to sing his boastful song about service under Ivan the Terrible. The Holy Simpleton, as "yurodivy" is here translated, sounds too knowledgeable in Mincho Popov's performance. The chorus are rather well-behaved for a Russian crowd under pressure; they are also too often behind the beat, and tend to swallow their final syllables (which affects the phrasing). The recording, good with the orchestra, is less than kind to the chorus. With the discs comes a well-produced booklet containing rather short background essays, and a transliteration of the text plus English, French and German translation.

-- Gramophone [4/1992]

In the early 1960s, Wergo launched a series that would become legendary in the history of contemporary music recordings. Studio Reihe Neuer Musik featured some of the most significant and cutting-edge compositions of the modern era. These highlights of 20th-century music history have lost nothing of their topicality or liveliness. Many of the recordings in the series have never been released on CD and some have been unavailable in any form for many years. This release, featuring Arnold Schoenberg's sprechstimme monodrama Erwartung, is possibly the most famous Studio Reihe title. Soprano Helga Pilarczyk is accompanied by the great conductor Hermann Scherchen in a riveting performance of one of the most important and influential works of the 20th century.

Led by a loyal and accomplished Rossinian in Ricciarelli and an exceptionally sure Ramey, this Gazza Ladra is the one to which listeners will inevitably turn for the foreseeable future.

According to an irate correspondent (February, page 1432) my "hatred of live recordings with all their inevitable characteristics" had "poisoned" my review of Philips's La Scala recording of the Italian version of Rossini's Guglielmo Tell. Given such an assumption, what chance has this new recording of La gazza ladra—"The thieving magpie"—recorded live during performances at last year's Rossini Festival in Pesaro? In the event, every chance. In the first place, the opera is being sung in the right language. Secondly, it would seem that the Teatro Rossini in Pesaro—rebuilt in 1816-18 and reopened, as it happens, with a production of La gazza ladra supervised by Rossini himself—is an excellent place in which to record. Like Glyndebourne, it is perhaps rather dry acoustically, but is a beautifully scaled theatre with a stage that is easier to cover than La Scala's. The theatre is, in fact, a kind of miniature La Scala, as handsome to look at as its big brother in Milan (where La gazza ladra had its prima in 1817) but with the intimacy of Glyndebourne or, say, the glorious Theatre Royal in Bristol. It would also seem that Michael Hampe's production was a relatively straightforward affair. There is a certain amount of coming and going in the secco recitatives (not by Rossini and musically unremarkable) but in the big scenes the principals are logically placed and unfussily directed, making for a recording that is cleanly miked, pleasantly immediate, and well arranged right across the stereophonic spectrum.

If there is an element of disappointment about this live theatre performance, it is some occasional lack of theatre atmosphere. The audience, whose responses are briefly registered and then faded out at the end of all the key movements, were clearly much taken with Samuel Ramey's remarkably fierce and Machiavellian portrait of the lecherous Mayor. But there is a slightly antiseptic feel about a good deal of the First Act and the start of the Second, where the prison scenes should really stir the emotions. They certainly did that at Wexford in 1959 with Marietta Adani as Ninetta and the young Janet Baker as the affectionate young peasant boy, Pippo; though in those days all the publisher Ricordi could come up with was La gazza ladra in the heavily re-ordered and reorchestrated version completed by Zandonai in 1942. In the present recording of the famous prison duet "E ben per mia memoria", Katia Ricciarelli and Bernadette Manca di Nissa are using no tear-jerking, sub-Puccinian revision, but the Urtext in Alberto Zedda's exemplary realization. So we must expect it to be a degree or so cooler.

That said, Act 2, which by Rossini's usual standards is unusually long and powerful, grows magnificently in this performance, culminating in the great Trial scene, Ninetta's march to the scaffold, and her deeply touching Andantino, "Deh tu reggi in tal momenta". Ricciarelli, the Ninetta, is a loyal and accomplished Rossinian and a regular visitor to Pesaro. Her vocal portrait of this wronged country girl may strike some as being too sophisticated. I recall an old 78rpm recording of Ninetta's cavatina sung by Lina Pagliughi that seemed to strike exactly the right note of unaffected artlessness. No need to count the spoons after this girl had left for town. Ricciarelli, by contrast, rather cossets the music and occasionally elaborates it, attempting in the process perhaps to suggest a degree of vocal ease that she does not now quite possess. As an old man, Rossini wrote variants and cadenzas for this cavatina for the soprano Giuseppina Vitali (see Appendix I/C of Ricordi's Italian-English vocal score of the Zedda edition; Milan, 1989: £24.95) but Ricciarelli appears to be using her own ornaments.

The rest of the ensemble is a good one, as is usually the case in Pesaro, surely led by an exceptionally confident Samuel Ramey playing the Mayor not as some meddling buffoon but as an extremely unpleasant rural Scarpia. William Matteuzzi, Ninetta's lover fresh from the wars, is splendidly ardent, Manca di Nissa is a rich-toned Pippo, sensitively played, and Ferruccio Furlanetto makes a strong impression as Ninetta's father, the soldier on the run from a corrupt regime and yet one more of those Rossinian father-figures trying to live out his life in politically troubled times. Still, Furlanetto doesn't get the extra aria, a newly adapted entrance aria, which Rossini provided for the singer Remorini for the 1818 Pesaro revival. Lucia, by contrast, keeps her Act 2 aria, though it was rarely performed after the Milanese prima. In this Pesaro production it has been moved forward so that it comes before the great Trial scene. This tucks it neatly away, allowing Lucia's doubts about Ninetta's guilt to register as a kind of aria del sorbetto before the onset of the chorus, quintet, and second finale.

The text, then, is close to that of the Milanese prima and is more or less complete, some understandably small and frequent cuts in the recitatives notwithstanding. The orchestral playing under Gianluigi Gelmetti is spruce and the accompaniments are generally prompt and businesslike, though Ricciarelli is occasionally indulged.

This is not the first commercial recording of La gazza ladra. Zedda's own account of the opera appeared on Fonit Cetra's Italia label some years ago (nla). But this Sony Classical version is the one to which Rossinians will inevitably turn for the foreseeable future.

-- Gramophone [10/1990]

Selections recorded at Air Studios, London, England in July 1997, and at EMI Abbey Road Studios, London, England on August 31 and November 23, 1997.
Operatic baritones often wind up playing villains and incidental characters--the tenor's companion, the guy who gets bumped out of the love triangle at the end, the ones who stand by and sing through the ensembles that make the plot work out for other people--but at times there's relief. Bo Skovhus has selected nine good-guy baritone characters. They may not be the leading men, but they're not the bad guys either.
Skovhus' way with this music is entirely winning. As in his lieder recitals for Sony, he is in gloriously rich voice, bringing a warm tone and an apt interpretation to each piece. The romantic rapture of Korngold's "Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen" sounds as easy to him as the put-on jollity of the drinking song from 'Hamlet.' The selections in this recital run the gamut of situations in four languages, and Skovhus shows himself to be completely at home in all. James Conlon and the English National Opera Orchestra provide ample support for this talented young singer.

Frid's best known work is his chamber opera the Diary of Anne Frank for solo soprano and an instrumental group of nine. In stark, sinister and elegiac colors he expresses the fear, hope, anger and resignation which make Anne Frank's diary a universal message of humanity. Anne's story is brought to life by soprano Eva Ben Zvi, who won rave reviews for her interpretation of this demanding role. The performance is underpinned by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra and conductor Andrey Chistiakov.