Opera, Operetta, and Oratorio
1464 products
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- Picture format: NTSC 16:9
- Sound format: LPCM 2.0 / DTS 5.1
- Region code: 0 (worldwide)
- Subtitles: English, French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Korean
- Running time: 187 mins
- No. of DVDs: 2
- No. of Blu-ray discs: 1
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Wagner: Gotterdammerung / Janowski, Ryan, Lang, Haller, Salminen, Bruck
WAGNER Götterdämmerung • Marek Janowski, cond; Lance Ryan ( Siegfried ); Petra Lang ( Brünnhilde ); Matti Salminen ( Hagen ); Markus Brück ( Gunther ); Edith Haller ( Gutrune ); Jochen Schmeckenbecher ( Alberich ); Marina Prudenskaya ( Waltraute ); Julia Borchert ( Woglinde ); Katherine Kammerloher ( Wellgunde ); Kismara Pessatti ( Flosshilde ); Susanne Resmark ( First Norn ); Christa Mayer ( Second Norn ); Jacquelyn Wagner ( Third Norn ); Berlin R Ch & SO • PENTATONE 5186 409 (4 SACDs: 243:42 Text and Translation) Live: Berlin 3/15/2013
In the fall of 2010, PentaTone announced plans to release new concert recordings of Wagner’s 10 mature operas—all with the same conductor, orchestra, and chorus plus top Wagnerian singers—by the end of the composer’s 200th birthday year. A given was that, as with all PentaTone releases, these would be hybrid multichannel SACDs featuring the best possible sound that the Polyhymnia engineering team could muster. Well, they did it. My copy of Götterdämmerung , recorded in May of last year, arrived on my doorstep on December 11, 2013. Almost three weeks to spare. It’s a successful conclusion to an ambitious undertaking, even if a couple of key singers here were not in top form.
Marek Janowski, as usual, favors brisk tempos. He brings in this Götterdämmerung in about 4:04:00; a quick check of five other audio-only versions of the work, of various vintages, revealed a range of 4: 17:00 (Keilberth, 1955) to 4:34:00 (Thielemann, 2010). Sometimes, this penchant for speed is quite evident, as with a third act Funeral March that’s something other than a dirge. Mostly, Janowski’s tempo choices translate into an increased sense of dramatic urgency rather than seeming rushed or perfunctory.
As signaled above, two key performers were not at the top of their game. Lance Ryan sang Siegfried for Zubin Mehta in the Valencia Ring —my favored video version—and, as I noted there, while no Melchior, he gave a dramatically effective account of the misguided hero. Here, his voice seems closed-in, pinched, sometimes even a little nasal in character—though his softer singing, as when he remembers his history to Hagen’s men right before he’s murdered, is better. Petra Lang is a top-tier Wagnerian who always brings intelligence and strong sense of character to her portrayals. Best here is her scene with Waltraute (capably sung by Marina Prudenskaya) where she begins with the same aura of radiant happiness she manifested when she waved goodbye to Siegfried in the Prologue—and then evolves into defiant fury. Lang’s Brünnhilde is set up perfectly for the gigantic disappointment in the form of Siegfried-as-Gunther who is the next visitor to her rock. “Verrat!”—“Betrayed!”—she cries out, and really sounds like she means it. In the last act, though, Lang’s vocal instrument does show some wear in more demanding passages: The voice is a little rough on top with some imperfect intonation. Violeta Urmana was the Brünnhilde for PentaTone’s Siegfried and she’s more technically secure—but, of course, the role in Götterdämmerung makes very different and more extreme demands on a vocalist than does the earlier drama.
But then there’s Hagen. Give me a choice between a grade B-plus Brünnhilde/Siegfried combination with a grade B Hagen, and a B-minus Brünnhilde/Siegfried with an A Hagen, and I’ll take the latter deal every time. And Matti Salminen is an A-plus Hagen: As Peter Rabinowitz noted in a review of the Valencia Ring in Fanfare 34:2, “he virtually owns the part these days.” Salminen’s act I monolog “Hier Stiz’ ich zur Wacht” is darkly horrifying, dripping with contempt not just for Siegfried but for the rest of humanity as well. Janowski backs him up with tritone-laden brass declamations of crushing power.
Markus Brück and Edith Haller capably sing Gunther and Gutrune. At least vocally, there’s no obvious attempt to make the former into a puffed-up fop and the latter into a floozy, as is so often the case in staged productions. They are there to function mechanistically in the scheme Alberich and Hagen have devised to recover the ring and there’s really no need to vilify them further. The trios of Norns and Rhine Maidens are dramatically and musically effective as well.
The choral work in act II is thrilling—and the recording lets you hear everything. Orchestral sonorities are wonderfully warm and richly textured: Listen to the blend of the eight horns in the music between scenes 1 and 2 of the second act (after Alberich and Hagen’s exchange), or to the glowing majesty of the work’s closing pages. The packaging is in the same luxuriant mode as the preceding nine releases: PentaTone provides a 320-page bound booklet that holds the four hybrid multichannel SACDs as well as a German/English libretto, another lengthy essay from Steffen Georgi, and plenty of information on the cast. By the way, I did it. I managed to hang onto the vouchers that came with the nine earlier releases in the series, so I’m entitled to a “special CD collection box.”
As the final D? chord so handsomely recorded by the Polyhymnia engineering team fades away, one is left marveling at the achievement of Marek Janowski and the many top-notch singers who joined him for PentaTone’s project. But mostly, one is left in awe at the remarkable staying power of the music penned by one Wilhelm Richard Wagner.
FANFARE: Andrew Quint
Meyerbeer: Les Huguenots (Sung in German)
Richard Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier
Britten: Death In Venice / Bartoletti, Miller, Riga, Hendricks [blu-ray]
Also available on standard DVD
Benjamin Britten’s last opera Death in Venice is based on the novella by Thomas Mann. It was first performed in England in 1973. The astringent score is marked by some haunting soundscapes of 'ambiguous Venice'. The boy Tadzio is portrayed by a silent dancer, gamelan-like percussion accompaniment. The music of the opera is precise, direct and movingly understated. Britten had been contemplating the novella for many years and began work in September 1970 with approaches to Piper and to Golo Mann, son of the author. Because of agreements between Warner Brothers and the estate of Thomas Mann for the production of Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film, Britten was advised not to see the movie when it was released. According to Colin Graham, director of the first production of the opera, some colleagues of the composer who did see the film found the relationship between Tadzio and Aschenbach "too sentimental and salacious". This contributed to the decision that Tadzio and his family and friends would be portrayed by non-speaking dancers. Themes in the work of "formalism in art and the perilous dignity of the acclaimed artist" have been noted.
Marlin Miller, tenor – Gustav von Aschenbach; Scott Hendricks, baritone – Traveller and other roles;François Bittar, countertenor – Voice of Apollo; Allessandro Riga, dancer – Tadzio;
La Fenice Theatre Orchestra and Chorus; Bruno Bartoletti, conductor
DIRECTION & COSTUMES: Pierluigi Pizzi
CHOREOGRAPHY: Gheorghe Iancu
Recorded Live at Teatro La Fenice, Venice 2008
NTSC; All Regions
Running time 155 min.
Sung in English
Subtitles: Italian, German, French, Spanish
Pfitzner: Palestrina / Petrenko, Frankfurt Opera and Museum Orchestra
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REVIEW:
Conductor Kirill Petrenko, leader of Bayreuth’s bicentenary Ring, matches Rudolf Kempe’s recently rediscovered 1955 Salzburg performance (Walhall): they’re both compelling story-tellers of large-scale operatic narrative who can mix and match dialogue scenes with varied tempi and dramatically appropriate orchestral balance. Frankfurt’s cast has plenty of gutsy ecclesiastical characters in the Council scene, Stallmeister and Mahnke do well by Ighino and Silla (but don’t miss young Elisabeth Söderström’s Son for Kempe), Koch is a worthy Borromeo and the whole is a triumph for British tenor Peter Bronder in the title-role.
– Gramophone
FIDELIO
ZELMIRA
Verdi: La forza del destino
Il etait une fois / Devos, Meng, Quatuor Giardini
With the rise of Romanticism, the topics of opera changed from the mythological fantasy of Baroque operas to the fairytale fantasy which graced the French stage long before Romanticism reached other European nations. Initiated by the Palazzetto Bru Zane, this project is built like a universal fairytale, inspired by Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard, and others, as set to music by French composers of the Romantic period, alternating between famous composers such as Offenbach and Rossini and little known masters like Viardot, Silver, and Isouard. This imaginary opera was conceived and transcribed by Alexandre Dratwicki for piano quartet and two singers- a soprano and a mezzo, the roles of which are performed here by Jodie Devos and Caroline Meng.
Debussy: Le compositeur et ses interprètes
Richard Wagner: Rienzi
Die Toten Stadt
Tutto Verdi Highlights
From the innovative and gorgeous "Tutto Verdi" project comes a chance to catch all the high points! "Tutto Verdi" includes arias from 20 Verdi operas. The selections hail from the best-known and loved productions like Aida, La Traviata and Rigoletto as well as lesser-known beauties, all in HD.
Giuseppe Verdi
TUTTO VERDI - The Complete Operas
(Highlights)
excerpts from:
Oberto
Un Giorno di Regno
Nabucco
I Lombardi alla prima crociata
Ernani
I due Foscari
Giovanna d’Arco
Attila
Macbeth
Il Corsaro
Luisa Miller
Rigoletto
Il Trovatore
La Traviata
I Vespri Siciliani
Simon Boccanegra
Un Ball in Maschera
La Forza del Destino
Falstaff
with:
Anna Caterina Antonacci
Barbara Bargnesi
Silvia Dalla Benetta
Daniela Dessì
Norma Fantini
Tamar Iveri
Nino Machaidze
Susan Neves
Dimitra Theodossiou
Sylvie Valayre
Svetla Vassileva
Marcelo Alvarez
Marco Berti
Francesco Demuro
Antonio Gandia
Carlo Guelfi
Ambrogio Maestri
Francesco Meli
Leo Nucci
Luca Salsi
Roberto Scandiuzzi
Vladimir Stoyanov
Parma Teatro Regio Chorus and Orchestra
Recorded live from the Teatro Regio di Parma
Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: PCM Stereo / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: Italian, English
Running time: 94 mins
No. of DVDs: 1
TROVATORE
Nessler: Der Trompeter Von Sackingen / Froschauer, Prey, Klepper, Spath
Monteverdi, C.: Orfeo (L') [Opera]
Mayr: Saffo / Hauk
As an opera-lover with a particular interest in the ways opera developed and proliferated over the centuries, I’ve sometimes dreamt of a world in which every important composer’s first opera was available to listen to. It’s a fantasy: first operas are seldom as good as later ones and the recording industry, quite naturally, tends to seek out the best, not the earliest. Nevertheless, to anyone like me, first operas always have an intrinsic fascination, for they mark the point at which a particular individual talent joins the larger tradition. They often have much to say about a young composer’s influences and aspirations as well as the standards and expectations of those for whom the opera is written.
Johann Simon Mayr’s Saffo (1794) is a superlatively good and superlatively interesting first opera. Mayr wrote some seventy operas in the course of his three-decade operatic career and the vast majority have not been recorded, nor indeed performed since he enjoyed his final premiere in 1824. Franz Hauk’s decision to excavate the very first is thus both enterprising and unexpected, yet the results fully vindicate the project and the efforts of those involved. Saffo is revealed as an extraordinarily confident and masterful work with the composer’s mature personality already largely developed. A major reason for this, no doubt, is its comparative lateness: Mayr was already thirty when it received its premiere at the Teatro La Fenice, Venice. It is hard to think of any other important opera composer from this era, Beethoven always apart, who waited so long before seeing his work on stage. Cimarosa, the leading Italian opera composer when Mayr’s career commenced, composed fourteen operas before he was thirty; Rossini, the dominant presence at the end of Mayr’s career, managed over twice as many as that.
Delay, in Mayr’s case, appears to have been all to the good. There is something very deliberate about Saffo, a work bearing none of the signs of haste and inexperience that mar so many composers’ first operas. It is carefully planned and beautifully composed with a strong feel for the dramatic potential inherent in Antonio Simeone Sografi’s fine libretto. Gluck was surely a powerful influence and it is easy to suppose that Mayr, a German, may have dreamed of being a second Gluck. A more immediate influence was no doubt Ferdinando Bertoni (1725-1813), Mayr’s teacher in Venice, who was himself influenced by Gluck – to the point where Gluck did not scruple quietly to ‘borrow’ some of Bertoni’s arias. Then there was the larger influence of the Venetian operatic world which had become a hotbed for experimentation with the forms of opera seria – with Paris in turmoil, there was surely no better city for a composer of Mayr’s originality to be making his debut.
Sografi’s libretto is in two acts; as Marion Englhart points out in the Naxos notes, this was itself unusual, as three acts were standard. As each act of Saffo lasts almost exactly an hour on this recording, we thus have the distinctively modern shape of a two-hour opera with a single interval. Nothing seems hurried, yet there are no longueurs either; the pacing and overall dramatic arc of the opera are finely judged. The story is simplicity itself. Saffo, Alceo, Faone and their attendants have come to the Greek city of Leucadia to hear the Pythia, or High Priestess, pronounce an oracle inspired by Apollo. Saffo, the legendary poetess (known in English as Sappho) loves Faone, but it is not reciprocated; he is mourning the death of his wife Cirene. Alceo, a poet, loves Saffo. This much is established in Act One. In Act Two, the oracle is finally pronounced, and as was often the case with oracles, it is not perfectly clear:
Saffo ardisca! Saffo dare!
Alceo, gemi! Aleco groan!
Tremi Faone! Faone tremble!
(The Naxos translation gives ‘Saffo ardisca!’ as ‘Saffo bears it’, which is surely an unfortunate mistake.) This winds the emotional situation up to a higher pitch. Saffo, with some encouragement from the Pythia, believes she should commit suicide by undertaking the famous Leucadian leap. However, at the last moment the tragedy is averted by Faone, encouraged by Alceo, showing some sympathy for Saffo’s sufferings.
I must say this ending came as a complete surprise, and not a welcome one. It has the sort of tacked-on happy ending quality found in so many earlier opere serie — and beautifully sent up in The Beggar’s Opera — but this was certainly not a requirement in Venetian operas of the 1790s. I was taking it for granted that the opera would end with Saffo’s spectacular suicide, in the manner of Giovanni Pacini’s much more famous Saffo of 1840. Interestingly, another Sappho opera of 1794, Jean Paul Égide Martini’s Sapho, did end tragically. The general dramatic movement of Mayr’s opera seems to be towards tragedy, and the sombre colouring of his music prepares one for it. Perhaps, for some reason, he was not allowed to compose the ending he would himself have chosen.
This was my only disappointment with this really exciting release. At no point does Mayr’s score sound routine or turgid, nor is there any of the fluff and padding that make so many eighteenth-century operas much longer than they need be. His recitative is incisively dramatic; his arias strongly shaped, brief and to the point; his choruses noble; his use of the orchestra colourful and inventive. One feels throughout that the subject and libretto were very congenial to Mayr, allowing him to play to his strengths in the alternation of grand ceremonial scenes with the emotionally-fraught conflicts between, and within, the three principal characters. In his 1989 book on Mayr, John Stewart Allitt refers to Saffo briefly as ‘a block-buster of an opera’. He does not elaborate on his grounds for that judgement, but now the evidence is here, such an accolade seems fully justified.
The Naxos studio recording is bright and forward to the point of occasionally being a little claustrophobic, but there is something gripping about its immediacy. Franz Hauk, who has done so much for Mayr (see below) and is surely the greatest living authority on the composer, conducts with authority and panache. The singers are uniformly impressive, with the principals entering into the drama of the opera rather than just singing beautifully.
What’s not to like? Well, you have to download the libretto, which always annoys me, but I haven’t enjoyed a first opera so much for a long time, nor felt so enlightened by the experience of listening to one. Saffo will be an essential acquisition for anyone who loves Mayr’s music and, at Naxos prices, it should prove very attractive to anyone interested in the way opera developed in the crucial period after the French Revolution and Mozart’s death.
– MusicWeb International
Verdi: Requiem
Rimsky-Korsakov: Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh / Albrecht, Netherlands Opera Philharmonic
Note: The Blu-ray version is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera is a fanciful fairytale, yet at the same time a parable on repression and political conceit. The peasant girl Fevroniya’s prayer that the city of Kitezh becomes invisible, thus protecting it from Tatar attack, is magically heeded. The girl herself, however, is captured by the invaders. The leitmotifs and highly expressive musical tone-painting tell the story, based on a pantheist world view, almost on their own. Grand crowd scenes contrast with a internal treatment similar to the music dramas of Richard Wagner. Marc Albrecht conducts the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and the dramatic staging comes from the renowned Russian director, Dmitri Tcherniakov.
Recorded live at the De Nederlandse Opera, February 2012
Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov
THE LEGEND OF THE INVISIBLE CITY OF KITEZH
Recorded live at the De Nederlandse Opera, February 2012
REVIEW:
The score, premiered in 1907, is filled with rich late romantic music, none of it virtuosic in the bel canto sense, but all demanding strong voices able to cut through the large orchestra. The orchestral and choral work is excellent. The long leading role of Fevroniya requires a great deal of stamina as well as a strong lyric-spinto soprano. Svetlana Ignatovich fills the bill vocally quite well, and her acting radiates the goodness and innocence of this idealized woman. Her Prince, handsome tenor Maxim Aksenov, is a perfect physical fit for the part; and his voice is pleasant enough for what is not really the leading part. As his father, Vladimir Vaneev displays an excellent bassbaritone and creates a believable benevolent leader. The baritone Alexey Markov has plenty of voice for his Act III scene relating the horrors of the Act II violence. Other strong contributions come from Gennady Bezzubenkov as a street singer, Mayram Sokolova as a fearful mother, and Vladimir Ognovenko as a frighteningly evil leader of the Tatars.
Best of all is tenor John Daszak as Grishka— a great role. The man is a drunken, almost amoral reveler; later, he is beset by guilt and hallucinations. Daszak makes the most of the role, from the man’s early disregard for anyone but himself to his need for comfort and understanding at the end. He so completely creates the character that his singing and acting can’t be separated; they work together completely to create a memorable portrayal.
I certainly would recommend this production to anyone wanting to become familiar with a major Russian work that isn’t performed that often outside Russia, though I would not be surprised to hear that this production (also done in Barcelona and Milan) would be available at other houses. The booklet has a fairly good synopsis and a good essay on the work, but no timings. There is also a bonus track with some interesting comments by the conductor and director.
-- American Record Guide
Verdi: Falstaff / Battistoni, Maestri, Salsi, Gandia, Pini
ORLANDO FURIOSO
Verdi: Otello
Puccini: Suor Angelica
