Frank Horvat’s Fractures is a very interesting new CD. It sets eleven texts for soprano and piano on the themes of fracking, environmental degradation and climate change. It’s a tough listen; not because it’s preachy or hard on the ear but rather because there is a degree of irony in the texts, the music and the performance that somehow makes the situations described even more horrible.
There’s a Faustian quality to the texts in the sense that we all (or at least most of us) go on doing the things we do even though we know, long term, it’s indefensible and we, or our children, will pay for it. And that’s true whether we drive an SUV or work for an oil company or lease our farm to a fracking company. Or for that matter fail to address fossil fuel development for fear of losing votes and tax revenues.
The latest Palazetto Bru Zane’s retrieval from the valley of lost things is Louise Bertin’s Fausto of 1831. It’s unusual in two respects. First of all it’s written by a woman (and quite a young one – she was 26) and secondly it’s an Italian language opera by a French composer written for the Théâtre-Italien in Paris; a theatre which produced mainly operas by Mozart and Rossini (its long time artistic director) with a few from other contemporary Italian composers such as Bellini and Donizetti; some composed for Paris, some imports. 
The new CD from husband and wife team Magdalena Kožená and Sir Simon Rattle consists of four sets of folk songs arranged for mezzo-soprano and orchestra; all of them pretty well known. There are the Five Hungarian Folk Songs of Bartok, Berio’s Folk Songs (all eleven of them), Ravel’s Cinq mélodies populaires grecques and Montsalvatge’s Cinco canciones negras.
Tarot is a new recital CD from tenor Timothy Stoddard and pianist Ellen Fast featuring recent works by American composers. There are four song cycles on the record. The first, Mortally Wounded, features settings by Mark Markowski of eight poems by Lorca in English translation. These are interesting and treat Lorca’s quintessentially Spanish themes sympathetically. The music is basically tonal but complex with flamenco inflected rhythms. It’s beautifully sung and played with diction so good that the absence of texts and translations is not worrisome. 
I first came across Russian soprano Ekaterina Siurina as Zerlina in the 2008 video recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni from Salzburg. She had had plenty of success already in coloratura roles such as Gilda and Adina and was, I thought, the best Zerlina I had come across. Fast forward to 2015 and she sang a very fine Violetta at the Four Seasons Centre opposite her husband Charles Castronovo. A few years on and it’s not terribly surprising that she’s starting to venture into slightly heavier lyric-dramatic territory. This is reflected in her recent album Where is My Beloved? recorded in 2022 with the Kaunas Symphony Orchestra conducted by Constantin Orbelian. 
Unfinished Business is a CD of music by Toronto based composer Tristan Zaba. It’s mostly songs for soprano (McKenzie Warriner) and piano (Paul Williamson) but the second and longest track; Matryoski and Blue Vase is a solo piano piece that plays with different textures and densities; sometimes very spare, sometimes very busy, for twelve minutes. There’s also a shorter, ceaselessly busy piece Swan Dive.
Once in a while one comes across a really impressive new opera and I would put The Lord of Cries; music by John Corigliano, text by Mark Adamo, into that category. It’s an example of how opera is good at telling “big stories”. In this case the base material is Euripides’ Bacchae but Adamo has relocated it to 19th century London and very cleverly layered onto it the core elements of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to create a multi-layered and subtle psychological thriller.
Sounds and Sweet Airs: A Shakespeare Songbook is a long and unusual CD by Carolyn Sampson, Roderick Williams and Joseph Middleton. The songs set texts (mostly) by Shakespeare but some of it is translated into German or French and in the case of Hannah Kendall’s Rosalind it’s fragments stitched together. Some of the material will be familiar to amateurs of art song but less than one might expect. There’s no Finzi or Quilter!
mouvance is a CD of music by Jerome Blais performed by Suzie LeBlanc (soprano), Eileen Walsh (clarinets), Jeff Torbert (guitars), Norman Adams (cello) and Doug Cameron (percussion). At first glance it looks like a set of songs or maybe a song cycle in the sense that it sets a series of French texts by various writers. In fact it has its origins in a multi-media show about, to quote Blais, “the universal themes of movement, migration and uprooting”. I think this is why I found it more satisfying to think of it as an integrated whole because there’s really no sense of separation between the “songs”. 
Ariane is a late opera (1906) by Jules Massenet. Now largely forgotten it has recently been recorded by the Palazzetto Bru Zane in their admirably produced series of French rarities. Unfortunately, unlike some of their other rediscoveries I wasn’t much taken with it.
operaramblings 