Few singers over the years have given me as much pleasure as Natalie Dessay. She and pianist Philippe Cassard have now announced their upcoming retirement from concert performance (Natalie retired from the stage a few years ago) and are about to release an album of their farewell tour material. It’s called Oiseaux de passage and it’s half an hour or so of bird themed chansons with some English language musical theatre numbers included for good measure.
Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is a one act symbolist opera for two singers based on a French folk tale. It’s scored for a large orchestra and uses quite a lot of dissonance and it’s a famously tough sing for the singer (soprano or mezzo) singing Judit. It’s been recorded a lot. Wikipedia lists 32 audio or video recordings, not including this new one from Gabor Brertz, Rinat Shaham and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Karina Cavellakis.
My review of the recent CD featuring Russell Braun with the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich is now up at La Scena Musicale. TL:DR it’s good!
Catalogue information: Alpha Classics ALPHA1031
Once in a while I go out on a limb with recordings. Sometimes it’s great. I’m not as a rule particularly fond of “cross-over” material but I loved Emily D’Angelo’s freezing for example. So I took a listen to Schubert Beatles from the New York Festival of Song. Broadly speaking, it pairs Schubert Lieder with Beatles’ songs on a similar theme; Yesterday and Im Frühling for example. The Schubert is mostly presented pretty straight (except for guitar accompaniment on Du bist die Ruh). The Beatles songs are arranged, by Steven Beier, for various combinations of piano, violin, bass and guitar. The principal singer is baritone Theo Hoffman with tenor Andrew Owens and soprano Julia Bullock joining on some tracks. Continue reading
Massenet’s Grisélidis gets the Bru-Zane treatment. Review at La Scena Musicale.
Catalogue information: Bru Zane BZ105
The latest CD from the Toronto Symphony and Gustavo Gimeno features two works by Stravinsky and a Glenn Gould inspired piece by Kelly-Marie Murphy. The first piece is the 24 minute long suite from the ballet Le baiser de la fée which is a sort of pastiche of what Tchaikovsky might sound like if Tchaikovsky could orchestrate as well as Stravinsky! It’s well played but I don’t find it terribly exciting.
Murphy’s piece is another story. There’s a running joke about short pieces by contemporary composers at the TSO. They get called “garage pieces” because they get played at the beginning of concerts when half the patrons are still on their way up from parking. Murphy’s Curiosity, Genius and the Search for Petula Clark absolutely does not deserve the label. It was inspired by a road trip Glenn Gould took up north one time and it’s fascinating. There’s a restless energy to it and a kind of flirting with atonality coupled with lyricism and a lot of percussion. It’s kind of like a feral love child of Holst’s Mars; Bringer of War and a Shostakovich symphony crammed into ten minutes. Continue reading
Olivier Py directed a production of Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées in 2023 and a live recording was made for CD. The Nightingale is sung by soprano Sabine Devieilhe and she is very good indeed. She has pretty much the perfect voice for this role with its coloratura sections and very high tessitura. Her voice sounds suitably sweet all the way up and her coloratura is very precise. She’s very well backed up by an all French cast featuring the excellent tenor Cyrille Dubois as the Fisherman and the unmistakable Laurent Naouri as the Chamberlain. Jean-Sébastien Bou also impresses as a suitably tremulous Emperor and there’s a nice cameo from Chantal Santon Jeffery as the Cook. The minor roles are all well sung and French diction is notably good across the board. Continue reading
Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius is very well served on record but a new version with good soloists may still be worth a look. And there is a new one on the Ondine label featuring Christine Rice, John Findon and Rod Williams. There’s a rather staggering collection of choirs; the Helsinki Music Centre Choir, the Cambridge University Symphony Chorus, Dominante | Helsinki Chamber Choir and the
Alumni of the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge. All this plus the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Nicholas Collon. Continue reading
Uncharted is a new CD from countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and pianist John Churchwell. It appears to be the first time a countertenor has recorded a disc of classic German Lieder which is interestig and perhaps surprising. There are three sets on the record. It starts with Korngold’s Lieder des Abschieds Op. 14; four songs I was previously unfamiliar with but I’m glad to have heard them. The second set alternates mostly well known songs by Brahms and Clara Schumann and the last set is Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis Op. 39 with, appropriately, his “Der Nussbaum” to wrap things up. Continue reading
More Rivers is a CD of piano music by Frank Horvat played by Christina Petrowska Quilico. It’s a sort of sequel to Rivers a record of music by Ann Southam, released on Centrediscs in 2005. It’s a set of seven pieces of various lengths. “More Rvers 1 – for Ann” is the last piece on the album but it’s the longest piece of the set and sets up in various ways the others. The music is a kind of looping minimalism but with quite a lot of harmonic complexity. Different rhythms and speeds are encountered. As Frank says in the notes “some rivers are long, some are short, some have rapids, and some have calm water”. But all but the most benighted rivers flow and these pieces evoke natural streams; clean, pure and life giving. Played with great virtuosity, discipline and control by Christina it’s a very pleasant way to spend 65 minutes. Continue reading
operaramblings 