Record companies love anniversaries, so
 with Wagner, Verdi and Britten all reaching significant ones in 2013, we can expect a plethora of celebratory releases. Rolando Villazón actually has two Verdi tributes out: one a compilation from his former label, Virgin Classics, which predates the tenor’s well- publicised vocal crisis and subsequent 
surgery; and this new, meatier
 collection, recorded – with able
 support from the Orchestra del
 Teatro Regio di Torino and its
 principal conductor Gianandrea 
Noseda – as an early birthday
 present to Italy’s operatic master. There’s no avoiding the difference
 in Villazón’s voice: his molten gold
 timbre has hardened and the sound as a
 whole (particularly up top) is narrower and tighter, no longer the effortless wonder it
 once was. What hasn’t changed is Villazón’s inimitable enthusiasm. He wears his heart quite audibly on his sleeve, and reinforces 
it with instinctive, pliable phrasing and a knack for five-minute vocal portraiture. His program here is substantial and varied, with plenty of lesser-known repertoire alongside several of the usual suspects, and even
 a few non-operatic selections, including 
three Romanze orchestrated by Berio. Villazón attacks each piece with gusto, and if the results aren’t always flawless, his commitment is undeniable. The Duke’s……

The gypsy is spellbinding but Bizet’s intimate tale lacks, well…intimacy in this operatic spectacular.

In his booklet notes to this most bewitching of releases, David Cranmer quotes from a 1787 journal entry by the English traveller William Beckford, in which he refers to modinhas, or Portuguese love songs: “This is an original sort of music different from any I ever heard, the most seducing, the most voluptuous imaginable, the best calculated to throw saints off their guard and to inspire profane deliriums.” Wow. Fans of Portuguese fado
 will find these songs, which effortlessly bridged the gap between the popular and the courtly, immediately attractive, languid and sensual. Just listen to a modinha such as Tempo que breve passaste (“So short a time you passed”) by Antonio da Silva Leite. Then there are those, such as the bright, cheeky Onde vas linda Negrinha (“Where are you going, pretty black girl”) by the same composer, alive with Afro- Brazilian rhythms. L’Avventura London director Zak Ozmo, who also plays Spanish and English guitars, has wisely broken up the songs and instrumental works with more “classical” fare with a Portuguese connection – keyboard pieces by Carlos de Seixas and Domenico Scarlatti. The performances by sopranos Sandra Medeiros and Joana Seeara, violone player Andrew Kerr and guitarists Taro Takeuchi…

The new issue reveals the results of our critical blind-testing of six of Australia’s top orchestras. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Something for the weekend: scientific research proves that vibrators are good for your vocal health.

Arts community broadly welcomes National Cultural Policy initiatives – plus a stack of cash.

Vivica Genaux’s superb recording of arias by Handel and Hasse composed for Faustina Bordoni shows why that 18th-century singer, who had a notorious catfight with her rival Francesca Cuzzoni in front of the Princess
 of Wales, was so envied. Handel wrote some glorious arias for her, most notably Lusinghe piu care from Alessandro, beautifully sung by Genaux on the opening track. Johann Adolph Hasse didn’t quite have the magic touch of Handel musically, but he married Bordoni and then proceeded to compose 
at least 15 operatic roles for her – truly justifying their contemporary reputation as the power couple of 18th-century opera. As for Genaux, she began her career singing Hasse’s music back in the 1990s with René Kollo, and her interest in his repertoire has never faltered. Her tightly controlled coloratura is ideally suited to Hasse’s technical showpieces, especially in Padre ingiusto from Cajo Fabricio. Genaux’s voice gets swamped occasionally in the Radio Bremen mix, but such is her compelling presence on disc that it hardly matters, and generally she finds sympathetic support in the Cappella Gabetta, established in 2010 with brother and sister Andrés and Sol Gabetta as the driving forces. They are sparkling interpreters of the Baroque……

The most gorgeous thing, even though it’s not exactly a bargain, and it’s never sounded better either.

By any standards, Opera Australia’s staging of La Traviata on Sydney Harbour in April was 
a triumph. The terrifying logistics included a purpose-built raked stage on foundations driven deep into the harbour bed, a signature oversized chandelier rising and falling above the action, and amplified singers coordinated by video-link with conductor Brian Castles-Onion and the AOBO Orchestra underneath it all. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, and did anyone mention how much this all must have cost? In the end, the critics were unanimous in their praise for 
a production that had so many unforgettable visual images associated with it, from the fireworks at the end of the drinking song, to the high notes in Sempre Libera being sung mid-air above Sydney Harbour, and on to the party guests in Act Two arriving by water-taxi. But as this incredible DVD demonstrates, what made this production one for the ages was the exact opposite of spectacle. With its superb casting, Francesca Zambello’s staging of the Verdi masterpiece centres ultimately on the deep and profoundly human relationships that occur against that tawdry world of the beautiful people and their glitter-ball existence. Librettist Francesco Piave’s intense psychological drama features lengthy duets wherein the……

The First World War took its toll on a whole generation but George Butterworth was probably British music’s greatest loss, killed on
 the Somme in 1916. Ivor Gurney survived, but was confined to a mental hospital for most of his remaining life. Ralph Vaughan Williams escaped with impaired hearing but his musical outlook was darkly coloured by his wartime experiences. Programming these composers side by side isn’t unusual (Simon Keenlyside’s excellent Songs of War is still fresh in my ears), but when the singer is as good as James Rutherford it’s a pleasure to revisit the repertoire. The songs were mostly written before the conflict and so are not all as mournful as the CD cover might suggest. Death is a regular guest of A E Housman, and Gurney’s poems are certainly elegiac, but there is much idyllic music here as well. Butterworth’s Bredon Hill and On the Idle Hill of Summer, Gurney’s Severn Meadows and Sleep and Vaughan Williams Let Beauty Awake and Bright is the Ring of Words are among the finest songs in any language. James Rutherford’s is a substantial baritone voice, darker than Bryn Terfel’s but with plenty of bite. Thomas Allen (or indeed Keenlyside) may…

Classical magazine Diapason hurls barbs at Opera Australia’s “hideous monstrosity.” Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Opera Australia’s heavyweight champion talks Falstaff, fatsuits and fad diets. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in