Octet, by Dave Malloy, opened at Crow’s Theatre on Wednesday evening. I guess it’s Crow’s big musical this year; a kind of follow up to Pierre, Natasha and the Great Comet, but it’s actually a very different kind of show. One major difference is musical. All the singing is a capella which puts extra demands on the singers (and isn’t unpleasantly loud). The whole cast; eight of course, are really rather good singers and pull off the solo and ensemble numbers extremely well. They can also act and they are backed up by a really effective lighting plot Imogen Wilson) and video (Nathan Bruce) that pretty much replace the set, which is pretty basic.
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Rose in Bloom is a new recital CD from coloratura soprano Erin Morley accompanied by Gerald Martin Moor. It’s a bit of a mixed bag. There’s some really nice singing and playing but some of the music choices leave me a bit cold.
So, to continue our look at the recording history of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas we turn to the 1961 Decca recording with Janet Baker in the title role. This has won so many awards and featured on so many “best of” lists that it might reasonably be considered to serve as some sort of “gold standard”. It’s certainly very good but I’m more interested in looking at what it says about the evolution of performance practice of Dido and Aeneas than in adding to the praise for Dame Janet’s performance.
So, you may ask, what is Opera Ramblings doing reviewing a recording of Rodgers & Hammerstain’s Oklahoma!? Well, it’s a project in the same vein as my reviewing the Bru-Zane recordings of more or less forgotten late 18th and 19th century French operas. It’s an attempt to put the piece in the context of its early performances and also to look at how it was originally performed for, like many early 19th century French operas, if and when Oklahoma! does get performed it’s usually in a style very different from the original The occasion for doing so is a new Chandos recording that attempts to reconstruct the sound of the original 1943 Broadway run. That the recording is very high definition and released in SACD format only increased my interest.
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