An email just in from Tapestry informs me that:
Dark Star Requiem by Andrew Staniland and Jill Battson has been nominated for TWO JUNO Awards! Produced by Tapestry in the 2010 Luminato Festival, it is up for Classical Album of the Year: Vocal or Choral Performance (for Tapestry Opera, the Gryphon Trio, and the Elmer Iseler Singers), and for Classical Composition of the Year (for Andrew Staniland)! Congrats to all involved in this landmark recording!
I’d echo that. Here’s the review that I wrote that appeared in a recent edition of Opera Canada. Continue reading
Aida Garifullina is a young lyric soprano of Tatar origin who already has some interesting achievements under her belt. She played Lily Pons in the Florence Foster Jenkins movie, placed first at Operalia in 2013, has sung a string of -ina roles at the Marinsky and is currently a member of the ensemble at the Wiener Staatsoper. She’s also done concert work with the likes of Dmitri Hvostorovsky and Andrea Bocelli. Now she’s released a debut CD called Aida Garifullina recorded with the ORF Radio-Symponieorchester Wien and Cornelius Meister.
In some ways listening to ballet music without the visuals is even weirder than listening to opera without them but at least it’s easier to rearrange and abridge ballet music for concert purposes. That’s the case with Max Richter’s Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works which is his condensation of Woolf Works which he wrote for Wayne McGregor and the Royal Ballet. As the name suggests it’s inspired by the works of Virginia Woolf and has three movements based on three of the novels; Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves.
Renée Fleming’s new CD Distant Light is quite unusual for a “diva disc”. It’s definitely not “Opera’s Greatest Hits” territory. Rather, it’s in three quite contrasting parts though all are linked by the idea of “emotional landscapes”. It starts off with Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, follows it with settings of Mark Strand poems by Anders Hillborg and finishes up with arrangements of Björk songs. She’s accompanied throughout by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra with Sakari Oramo conducting.
This review first appeared in the print edition of 
This review first appeared in the print edition of 
This review first appeared in the print edition of 
This review first appeared in the print edition of 
This review first appeared in the print edition of 
This review first appeared in the print edition of 
operaramblings 