While her colleagues scramble to devise a novel concept for every disc they release, French soprano Véronique Gens has been steadily developing a project she began six years ago with a disc exploring the French Baroque tragédie lyrique from Lully to Rameau. This release, the third in her series focusing on the tragic heroines of 18th- and 19th-century French opera, skips ahead a century. And judging by the musical riches she’s still unearthing, she may well stretch it to a fourth. Some of the repertoire here will be familiar to aficionados of grand opera: Gluck’s Iphigénie (1779), Berlioz’s Dido (1858) and Verdi’s Elisabeth (in her French incarnation) jostle with the heroines of the forgotten Auguste Mermet’s Roland à Ronceveaux and Kreutzer’s Astyanax. Most of these women sing in the face of massive personal and/or political crises, and Gens’s distinctive ability to sound both utterly refined and completely unhinged at the same time ensure that each character, however obscure, comes to life with equal vigour. Many of the arias here were originally written for singers who would today be classified as mezzo-sopranos but their low, meaty tessitura holds no perils for Gens, whose lissome soprano has always been… Continue reading Get…

Not even wet weather fears can dampen the excitement surrounding Opera on Sydney Harbour.

Opera's 12 most gripping last gasps: stabbings, suicides, strangulation and more!

Sometimes the effect is rather bitty; the Aida love duet on the Nile stops abruptly after three minutes. The best feature of these discs, for me, is the orchestral and choral work which illustrates the improvement, probably due to the influence of the Toscanini recordings, that has taken place in the performance of Verdi’s music in the past 50 years. Also noticeable is the excellence of Richard Bongynge as a conductor of Italian opera; he stands successfully alongisde the other famous conductors represented. Pavarotti is a serious and musical artist, but there is a bleating, rasping quality to his voice above forte which may not be noticeable in the opera house (where I never heard him) but which becomes tiresome and irritating when heard in long stretches. He does not have the silvery quality of Bjorling or Bergonzi or the dusky beauty of Villazón’s voice. Of his distinguished associates, Margaret Price sounds excellent in the Ballo in Maschera excerpts, Kiri Te Kanawa exhibits too much tremolo as Desdemona, Maria Chiara is so good as Aida that one wonders why she is not better known, Monserrat Caballé, as usual, sounds far better on records than she ever did in the opera…

Here is Natalie Dessay to prove it with half a dozen demonstrations from operas such as Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Bellini’s I Puritani, Verdi’s Hamlet, Bernstein’s Candide and Meyerbeer’s Le Pardon de Ploërmel. The liner notes provide a kind of potted analysis of each of the French soprano’s subjects, in case we think all madnesses are identical. Given the form she displays, we expect Dessay’s voice to be all over the place at a moment’s notice, but there it is, on the note every time. Are there any operas in which the heroine’s madness is anything other than deeply tragic? Donizetti was one composer who should know, starting and ending this CD with the two longest items on it, but finding only anguish for Dessay to sing about, even though she is allowed two minutes longer to keep looking than she is credited with in the notes. One listener’s sparkling coloratura is another listener’s silly noises, proving that a singer can have more control over their voice than they know what to usefully do with. But the rather debatable attraction of hearing the drama of over-the-top theatrical madness has been determined to be the selling point of this CD, and…

Crank the amp and forget the neighbours – let everyone share in Mozart’s final creation.

Verdi’s La Traviata will be performed on a floating stage on Sydney Harbour next year, NSW Premier Kristina Keneally has announced.