Belle Cao
VOICEBOX:Opera in Concert opened their 50th anniversary season at the Jane Mallett Theatre with the first of three Verdi rarities. Un giorno di regno was Verdi’s second opera and it premiered at La Scala in 1840 to no great acclaim. It’s a curiously old fashioned piece for its time. Perhaps the fact that it sets a libretto written over twenty years earlier accounts for some of that. It’s very much a bel canto work. It’s sort of a comedy though it’s not actually all that funny; being largely concerned with machinations about who marries whom played around a somewhat implausible impersonation of the King of Poland by a minor French aristocrat. It’s no sillier than many Donizetti operas but perhaps by 1840 that formula was wearing rather thin. Continue reading
Mi País: Songs of Argentina is a CD from bass-baritone Federico de Michelis and an ensemble that includes Steven Blier on piano, Shinjoo Cho on bandoneon, Sami Merdinian on violin and Pablo Lanouguere on bass. The songs are basically from the middle decades of the 20th century and mostly by classically trained composers such as Carlos Guastavino and Carlos López Buchardo.
Benjamin Appl’s latest CD is a selection of Schubert Lieder arranged for orchestra. Most of the arrangeents are by Max Reger or Anton Webern but there are a few surprising ones like an arrangement of “Ständchen” by Jaques Offenbach. The songs themselves are a mix of the very familiar; “Die Forelle”, “An die Musik”, and the less well known such as “Gruppe aus dem Tartarus” but, to be honest, it’s mostly Schubert’s Greatest Hits.
Dancing with Love is a new CD of music by Afarin Mansouri on the theme of “love” in its many variants from the erotic to the transcendent. Eleven of the twelve tracks set Persian/Farsi poetry, from the 12th century CE to the present. The twelfth is a lament for solo flute. The musical style varies a lot with traditional Persian influences combining with modern Western compositional techniques in different ways. It leads to interesting results. Just to pick a few tracks, “Unattainable” for mezzo-soprano and piano sounds rather like a French chanson whereas a track like “Pain (Sorrow)” for mezzo-soprano, clarinet, piano, tar, cello and udu sounds much more like traditional Persian music. Other tracks incorporate electronics or jazz elements. One thing almost all the tracks have in common is that there’s a lot of melodic invention which makes it a very easy, as well as a very varied, listening experience.
operaramblings 