The critics have spoken and the results are in. Here are Limelight's five top recordings of 2015.

This month’s list of Australia’s top 20 classical music albums.

It’s unfortunate that at 51, French tenor Roberto Alagna is probably best remembered for walking off after being booed by the La Scala claque, all captured on YouTube. And then there were tempestuous years with second wife Angela Gheorghiu, which prompted the nickname “the Ceausescus” and for Jonathan Miller to dub them the Bonnie and Clyde of opera. But there have been triumphs as well. From his earliest days, listening to his Sicilian dad singing Italian songs on building sites around Paris, and cathartic moments when he saw Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso and later met Luciano Pavarotti at a record signing, eventually auditioning for him, Alagna’s life has resembled the synopsis of an operatic potboiler. Hence the title of his latest album, My Life Is An Opera, which comes with the most excruciating liner notes I have read for a while and on which he forsakes his earlier crossover hits for some mainly bel canto and verismo arias. In among them he includes a couple of surprises – Ernest Reyer’s Esprits, gardiens des ces lieux vénérés and Karl Goldmark’s Magische Töne, for example, as well as a short excerpt from his brother’s opera The Last Day of a…

This month's list of Australia's top 20 classical music albums.

This month's list of Australia's top 20 classical music albums.

Hans Werner Henze regarded himself as an outsider in terms of politics, sexuality and race. Upon fleeing Germany in the early fifties, he arrived in Italy where he would remain for the rest of his life – the Teutonic tempered by the Neapolitan sun and indeed the Italian language. He quickly solidified his position as the preeminent German symphonic composer this side of Hindemith although he was seen as conservatively tuneful by the likes of Boulez and Stockhausen. It was during this period that Deutsche Gramophon recorded much of his work commencing with the Neapolitan Songs written for the great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Such fine recordings form the bulk of this important 16CD set. DFD also features in excerpts from the opera Elegy for Young Lovers and the pro-‘Red’ cantata Der Floss der Medusa (the straw that broke the German middle class back when a red flag was unfurled at the premiere). Highlights include the sublime works commissioned by Paul Sacher, the double concerto for harp and oboe featuring the Holligers and the magical Fantasia for strings (1966) – a movement of which was used over the closing credits to The Exorcist. Later works are included as well as the delightful Undine – the approachable ballet written for Ashton…

The young musician was in town to headline at August’s Deutsche Grammophon Yellow Lounge in Sydney. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Forget the Complete Wagner with its paltry 43 CDs – this monolith, weighing in at a gargantuan 75 discs, beats all comers this year – that is if you can manage to struggle home with it from the shop! From 1840 to 1860, Giuseppe Verdi produced a new opera nearly every year. A slowpoke compared with some of his contemporaries (the likes of Donizetti and Pacini could
whack out three or four operas
a year) but considering that
Verdi’s output included works
like Nabucco, Macbeth, Rigoletto,
La Traviata, Il Trovatore and Un
Ballo In Maschera, that’s pretty good
going by anyone’s standards. He slowed down over the following 30 years, with only five more works seeing the light of day – but what masterworks they were! Decca and Deutsche Grammophon have made so many recordings over the years that it comes as no surprise that Universal Music are able to curate a “complete works” of the depth of quality that we have here. The classic sets include Kleiber’s La Traviata with Cotrubas and Domingo, Abbado’s Macbeth, Giulini’s Rigoletto and Il Trovatore, Domingo’s finest Otello and Karajan’s earlier Aida. We also get both versions of La Forza del Destino (St Petersburg and Milan) and both French and Italian…

Universal Music launches Sydney nightclub concert series with suave tenor Noah Stewart. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Plenty of hype arrives with this release from young Polish pianist Rafal Blechacz, but little detail. My Internet trawling reveals that he was born in 1985, and at the age of 20 won all five sections of the Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. He so impressed the judges that they awarded no second prize. Blechacz has recorded three previous discs for Deutsche Grammophon, of Chopin Preludes and concertos, and sonatas by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Here he gives us a recital of early 20th-century French and Polish music. In the accompanying note Blechacz sites Michelangeli as his idol in Debussy, but his playing strikes me as less soft-edged than that of the mighty Italian. There is a crispness to the Toccata from Pour le piano, and a bell-like ping to the pentatonic peals of Pagodes from the Estampes suite, that bring to mind his older Polish compatriot Krystian Zimermann. High praise indeed. Blechacz’s fluidity and supreme dynamic control are astonishing, and he shows attention to fine detail. He can also produce a full tone, as in the radiant climax to L’Isle joyeuse, without it turning clangourous. He is equally fine in the Szymanowski pieces, but I wish he had recorded…

What a delightful disc. Or should I not use that adjective? It is, after all, a fallback response to the hideous tie you get from your auntie at Christmas. How about: relaxing? Or invigorating? All these epithets apply to the two early concertante works that Abbado and his handpicked Orchestra Mozart give us here. The performances seem to have been recorded during a tour (along with others in the same Mozart series): two venues are given for the Sinfonia Concertante, although whether the recordings are live is unclear. It doesn’t matter; the playing is exemplary and there is no discernible audience noise. Notable contributions are made by all the soloists. In the Sinfonia Concertante I was most taken with the clarinet of Alessandro Carbonare and the oboe of Lucas Macías Navarro, both musicians characterful and wonderfully accurate. In the Concerto for Flute and Harp the two soloists play as one, and flautist Jacques Zoon’s silvery tone is beautifully caught in the airy acoustic of the Haydn Auditorium in Bolzano. It is a tone we know well: Zoon was first flute of the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Chailly, the Berlin Philharmonic under Abbado, then the Boston Symphony. Abbado sets perfect… Continue reading Get…

Hélène Grimaud has provided a thoughtful program for this, her first ever Mozart recording. The two concertos, both in sunny major keys, are not among the most often recorded of the composer’s output, and there is a substantial addition in the form of a concert aria, originally from Idomeneo, for soprano and orchestra with piano obbligato. The recording is full-blooded, not unlike Grimaud’s playing. This is not the gentle, caressing Mozart of Maria João Pires. Grimaud finds both strength and depth in the Adagio movement of the A Major Concerto (No 23, K488), taken slower than usual, and a bubbling vivacity in the work’s Allegro assai finale. Similarly fine pianism characterises the F Major Concerto (No 19, K459), where she conveys the carefree nature of one of Mozart’s brightest and breeziest works. Erdmann sings the concert aria with poise, understanding and spot on intonation. In a live context she may have a small voice, but it records beautifully. Again Grimaud’s piano is an asset. The downside of this disc lies in the fact that these are live concert recordings. In big dramatic works the presence of an audience can galvanise a performer, but this is not so necessary in Mozart….