Kaufmann journeys back in time for his best solo disc in years.

A tribute to a legend, and a solo debut of rare drama and scope.

Are the heroines of the title the female narrators of these songs and arias, or are they the composers – women including Claudia Sesa, Barbara Strozzi, Francesca Caccini and Lucrezia Vizzana – who surmounted impossible challenges to give voice to their music? They are, of course, both, and it’s a combination that makes for a charged programme. A natural storyteller never afraid to paint period music in rich hues, soprano Ruby Hughes delights in the expressive details of Strozzi’s arioso-like L’Eraclito Amoroso and Lagrime mie. Both are closer to opera than chamber music, the latter opening in a prescient clatter of chromatics. If Hughes takes risks, they only match those of the music. Sesa and Vizzana represent the women confined to convents, for whom music was a rare emotional and expressive outlet. Sesa’s Occhi io vissi di voi has all the erotic spirituality of Teresa of Avila’s writings – a love-song clothed in vestments, and while Vizzana’s O Magnum Mysterium is more restrained, the contrast of the chromatic wounds of the verse to the consonant balm of the Alleluia is a poignant as it is sophisticated. Leavening the vocal music with a thoughtful selection of instrumental works, Jonas… Continue reading Get…

According to 16th-century clerics, convent polyphony was dangerous, liable to lead nuns into vanity and other wickedness. Listening to the sensuous contrapuntal writhings and twinings, the ecstatic, rapturous beauty of these motets – possibly by Lucrezia Borgia’s daughter Leonora d’Este – you wonder if they didn’t have a point. The motets are from the Musica quinque vocum motteta maternal lingua vocata – the earliest published collection of polyphony composed for nuns. As piece after piece of graceful, equal-voice counterpoint unfolds, what’s striking is how progressive and sophisticated the style is for the 1540s, its smooth consonance spiced with occasional hits of chromaticism, its long lines embellished with little gilded flickers of ornamentation. With voice-parts confined to a two-octave range the risk is of a lack of scope. But thanks to careful deployment of solo and collective forces – the professional singers of Musica Secreta and excellent amateurs of Celestial Sirens – and judicious use of bass viol and organ, there’s enough delicate variation to keep things interesting. Haec dies is rejoicing, kept from all-out ebullience by its dark modality, while the filmy Hodie Simon Petrus, with its imitative upper voices and lace-like detailing, unfolds in rapt arcs. The… Continue reading…

Six volumes into Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s tour through the complete Haydn Piano Sonatas, listeners will have a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Hyperion’s admirable Romantic Piano Concerto series has been running for over 25 years. It would be easy to be exercised by the fact that it has taken until now, Volume 70, to arrive at a concerto by a female composer. Easy, but not entirely fair. Male dominance in the genre is almost total – even today – and perhaps more interesting than wrangling over quotas is the question of why. It’s a question this disc answers with vehement clarity. You only have to read the contemporary response to Amy Beach’s concerto – critics reading autobiographical significance into the lone voice of the piano crying out against the oppressive orchestra – to understand that a woman could never inhabit this most combative of musical forms on the same terms as a man. It’s interesting that both other concertos here eschew the traditional three-movement form – an attempt, perhaps, to reclaim and redefine their musical territory. Dorothy Howell’s 1923 Piano Concerto stretches the definition of “Romantic” to its limit. Filmic in scope, an abstract tone-poem drawing heavily on Debussy and Strauss, this single-movement work is the weakest of the… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a…

The clue is in the title. Bellini’s ‘graduation opera’ Adelson e Salvini is more buffo bromance than tragic romance, and none the worse for it. Composed while he was still a student at Naples’ Royal College of Music, and premiered by an all-male cast of fellow students in 1825, the work is a precociously tuneful, intermittently dramatic affair (though the less said about the 17th-century Irish plot the better). Rossini and Mozart are plentifully represented here in the younger composer’s first opera, but there are also tantalising hints of the mature composer to come, and this premiere recording by Opera Rara does its youthful promise proud. Opera Rara know how to put together a cast, and this one’s no exception. Baritone Simone Alberghini (Lord Adelson) and tenor Enea Scala (his friend, the painter Salvini) battle for the affections of the magnificent Daniela Barcellona’s Nelly – richly resonant, painting her vocal lines with the thickest of brush-strokes – while Maurizio Muraro blusters and booms characterfully as the Leporello-ish manservant Bonifacio. Rising young conductor Daniele Rustioni shapes an affectionate and lightfooted account of the score, deploying some lovely solo woodwind textures (skittish flutes for Bonifacio, melancholic oboes for Nelly’s… Continue reading Get…

Carl Heinrich Graun (1704-1759) shared Hasse’s popular acclaim and fondness for effervescent coloratura. Unlike Hasse, however, his music has remained confined to the archives, and it has fallen to Russian soprano Julia Lezhneva to dust it off. The arias here – world premieres all, save one – make a startlingly strong case for Graun’s music in all its exhilarating virtuosity and emotional variety. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Lezhneva, whose advocacy is blighted by technical problems. Something has gone badly wrong with this voice. Back in 2010, aged just 21, Lezhneva had a winning combination of purity and agility, and a lovely ease to her production. But vocal quirks and an increasingly manufactured delivery have crystallised into a voice that has retained agility, but at the cost of power and tonal control. Lezhneva now sounds like a precocious boy-treble – light and nimble, but snatching at top notes, swooping through intervals, blurting through legato passages. A shame, as there’s some thrilling music, stylishly performed by the exemplary Concerto Köln. Graun’s two styles – poised and proto-galant in ballads, outdoing even Vinci for brilliance in the stormy numbers – make for a disc of contrasts. There’s… Continue reading Get…

Operalia winner Aida Garifullina was signed to an exclusive recording contract by Decca back in 2015. It has taken a while, but now, with the release of her self-titled debut album – an exquisite selection of 19th-century songs, arias and folk-lullabies – we can finally hear why. The Russian lyric soprano has a wonderful technical ease which, coupled with a full, even tone, promises much for the future. But, in case you’re judging a singer by her repertoire, it’s worth pointing out that this disc doesn’t tell the whole story. Glancing down the generous programme from Juliette’s Je veux vivre to the Bell Song from Lakmé and the Queen of Shemakha’s two arias from The Golden Cockerel, you’d imagine perhaps a lighter, higher voice than you actually get. It’s a sleight-of-hand that’s far from unpleasant. Transposed down a tone, the Delibes gains in resonance and colour – these are bells of burnished gold rather than silver – and while Garifullina’s Juliette feels more poised society hostess than love-struck innocent, she’s one you’d clear your schedule for. Coloratura showpieces aside, the bulk of the disc comprises Russian repertoire, much of it glancing to the East and drawing on the… Continue reading…

How do you take your Poulenc? I only ask because, conveniently, The Sixteen have recorded a lot of the repertoire on their latest disc before, and their thinking has changed dramatically in the 30-year gap. The contrast between the 1990 Figure Humaine (Virgin Classics, now Erato 5624312) and the newly released Francis Poulenc: Choral Music (CORO) is striking – neither an improvement nor the reverse, simply two very different approaches to the composer’s sacred music. Poulenc’s journey to faith was a swift and dramatic one. The turning point is usually placed in 1936, when two separate events together propelled the composer into a new state of mind. The sudden and violent death of his friend, composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, in a car accident prompted a visit to the small chapel at Rocamadour, where a mystical experience restored the Catholicism of his childhood. He immediately began work on a sacred piece – the Litanies à la Vierge Noir – taking his first steps in a genre that would become a constant throughout his life. The sound-world of Figure Humaine is one of gauzy, glossy beauty – a Mannerist vision of a heaven that’s all soft-focus loveliness and elegance…. Continue reading Get unlimited…

It was the soundtrack to 1994 film Farinelli that put Les Talens Lyriques on the musical map over two decades ago. Now Christophe Rousset and his musicians mark their 25th anniversary by coming full circle, with an album of arias associated once again with the 18th century’s star castrato. But Farinelli is now well-trodden ground. Vivica Genaux, David Hansen and Philippe Jaroussky are just the most recent singers to lay claim to this repertoire on disc, so is there really a need for another homage? There are two strong arguments in this disc’s favour. In Ann Hallenberg, Rousset has a collaborator whose agility, power, and range of vocal colour is singular – capable of inhabiting both of Farinelli’s contrasting musical personalities. The project is also particularly canny in its repertoire choices, rejecting the usual single-composer route in favour of a broad selection of musical highlights from, not only Handel and Porpora, but also Leo, Hasse, Giacomelli and even Farinelli’s own composer brother. The result is a disc full of musical drama, heightened by a live recording originally made in 2011 at the Bergen International Festival. After a slightly slow start in Riccardo Broschi’s handsome, but pedestrian Son… Continue reading Get…

Renée Fleming is no stranger to crossover. America’s favourite soprano has dabbled in rock music (2010’s Dark Hope), jazz (2005’s Haunted Heart), even duetted with Michael Bolton. But, until now, these have remained off-duty projects, separate from her official operatic identity. But in Distant Light she brings two worlds together, combining covers of Björk songs with music by Barber and Anders Hillborg in a recording that might just offer a vision of things to come in the classical music business. This feels like a coherent and convincing recital programme, tipping naturally from Barber’s hazy vision of pre-lapsarian America into Hillborg’s luminous sonic landscapes before casting off the classical anchor and drifting out into Björk’s broad lakes of sound and texture, beautifully reimagined in Hans Ek’s arrangements. Fleming still has one of the loveliest voices in the business, and that blooming tone is celebrated not only in the Barber but in Hillborg’s settings of poems by Mark Strand, former US Poet Laureate, which eschew the composer’s signature massive soundscapes for gentler, more intricate textures (lovingly performed here by Oramo and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic). If the tone feels more manufactured in the three Björk tracks, it’s not unpleasantly… Continue reading Get…