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 splendid DVD of Norwegian director Stefan Herheim’s 2013 Salzburg Festival production of Die Meistersinger draws a strong visual analogy between Wagner’s comic opera and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It works well, aided by a superlative cast, some knockout staging and the full Vienna Philharmonic and Staatsopernchor under conductor Daniele Gatti. The sets comprise oversized Biedermeier furniture and fittings, emphasising the fairytale feeling. Roberto Sacca as Eurovision song candidate Walther works well with Anna Gabler convincing as his eventual bride. The show, of course, belongs to Hans Sachs, and in Michael Volle we have a particularly fine one, slapstick when playing off Markus Werba’s pedantic, conniving Beckmesser, but also with a very human touch. There are some clever theatrical moments, but look out for the Apprentices’ Dance when hand puppets make way for the full-size thing. Busts of Beethoven, Goethe and Schopenhauer – representing German art to be protected from foreign influences – act as silent witnesses until the exquisite quintet when Sachs unveils the noticeably larger bust of Wagner himself. There is some obligatory on-stage carnality in the crowd scenes but nothing too hard-core. Gatti (shortly to take up his new position as chief conductor of the Concertgebouw),…

Extraordinary chemistry at work in Boesch and Martineau’s compelling double act. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Philippe Jaroussky manages the exquisite shift from Handel to Hahn. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

When Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor was premiered in Naples in 1835 there was as much drama off stage as on. The San Carlo opera house was on the verge of bankruptcy and the musicians hadn’t been paid. His diva, Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani, was miffed that the tenor Edgardo’s death scene comes after hers – this in spite of the fact that he stabs himself when he hears her death knell! To make things even worse the glass harmonica player, so vital for the mad scene, quit and the composer had to rescore it with a second flute. Fortunately conductor Jesús López-Cobos seems to have had a much easier time with this fine new release starring German soprano Diana Damrau and the popular Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja. Recorded from live concert performances in Munich over four nights, this is a good if not exceptional production. The two leads make a handsome vocal couple but there are occasional ragged edges that would have been airbrushed out in a studio recording. In the big duet Verranno a te sull’aure, for example, Calleja finishes well before… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The Guild label’s mission to restore Volkmar Andreae to the “pantheon of 20th century Swiss composers” continues apace with the third release of his orchestral works, with the excellent Bournemouth Symphony conducted by the composer’s grandson Marc Andreae. The Symphony in F was composed when he was just 20 and was his first large-scale orchestral work. Its debt to Brahms is undeniable, but it also shows the Wagnerian influence of Andreae’s teacher Franz Wüllner, who premiered Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. Andreae is best known for his recordings of the Bruckner symphonies and it is obvious from this early work that he has studied the Austrian master’s command of symphonic structure. Andreae was offered to succeed Mahler as conductor of the New York Philharmonic but preferred to stay with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zürich. However, like Mahler he did compose some settings of poems by Li-Po after Hermann Hesse pointed out the Tang dynasty poet’s works. Li-Tai-Pe, here beautifully sung by English tenor Benjamin Hulett, is the jewel in the crown of this album. The eight songs are worth the purchase price alone. However John Anderson’s performance of the Concertino for Oboe and Orchestra is definitely an added bonus. In all,…

Grey skies the perfect backdrop for this Venezuelan’s prodigious talents. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

At the risk of being flippant, male pianists seem to divide into two groups, judging by their album covers – those with fashionable stubble and those with cleanly shaved jowls. Barry Douglas and Jonathan Plowright both fall into the former category, and this might seem an irrelevance were it not for the fact that both are in the middle of their Brahms projects and both have new volumes out now. Both tackle the Sonata No 2 Op. 2 on their latest releases, giving us an opportunity to compare their very different approaches. Plowright’s recording was reviewed last month and I have to say that I prefer his nuanced and “cooler” reading over the Irishman’s more heated interpretation. Douglas, though, does bring a sense of excitement to the Lisztian outer movements. The Chandos team produces a warmer and more immediate sound than the elegant precision of the Swedes at BIS, so that may influence your choice. Douglas knows how to balance a program, placing the sonata last after the delightful 16 Waltzes Op. 39, alongside intermezzos – two from Op. 119, one from Op. 116 – and the solemn and… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe…

For the past ten years Cinquecento have been carving themselves a niche in the specialised field of pre-Baroque sacred works, and madrigals by composers whom most of us have never encountered. Formed in Vienna and based in Germany, the group comprises six singers from five countries. For their eighth release on the British Hyperion label Cinquecento revisits three 16th-century Flemish singer-composers, Philippe del Monte, Jacobus Vaet and Jacob Regnart, this time performing their secular songs, and introduce us to a previously unknown composer. Not much is chronicled about Jean Guyot de Chatelet (Joannes Castileti), other than that he served briefly as Kapellmeister to Emperor Ferdinand I before returning to his home in Liege. However Guyot is not afraid to express his feelings, hence: “Instead of happy distractions, melancholy attacks me/I am bound by the ties of love/discipline holds me harshly prisoner”. Or his song about Susanne who has to fend off two dirty old men to preserve her innocence. These songs have all the colour and earthy life of the contemporaneous paintings of Pieter Brueghel and his sons and they sit well with the sextet’s pleasing vocal blend. Recorded at… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month…

Italian mezzo Cecilia Bartoli will be remembered in years to come not only for her formidable, many would say matchless, talent as a singer but also for her ability to uncover lost or neglected treasures from the Baroque and early Classical eras. Starting with her Vivaldi album, then with the Salieri and Sacrificium projects to the dazzling Steffani series, the Roman diva has been stamping her considerable personality on a rich vein of musical gold and bringing ‘new’ old music to the wider public. Now, with St Petersburg, she turns her attention to a fascinating period in Russian history, the 18th century when, under three empresses, the nation’s culture and politics were wrenched from the dark ages and brought into the sunshine of western European enlightenment. The troika of Tsaritsas – Anna who reigned from 1730-40, Elizabeth (1741-61) and Catherine the Great (1762-96) – imported Italian musicians and composers and commissioned the first Russian operas. Once performed, though, the scores languished in the archives of St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre until Bartoli came along and set them free. Five composers feature on 11 tracks in this treasure trove of delights, opening appropriately… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per…

In their 70th birthday year, it seems that Musica Viva have pulled out all the stops.

There are two Opera Australia DVDs of Madama Butterfly and, apart from the music and some of the performers, you could be watching two different operas. For Moffatt Oxenbould’s production – still going strong after 18 years – designers Peter England and Russell Cohen used Kabuki theatre as their inspiration with ninja-clad servants handing out props; sliding screens and a surrounding moat to represent the divide between Japanese and American culture. Cio-Cio-San, also sung by Japanese soprano Hiromi Omura, was dressed in a kimono, looking the true geisha. For the Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour production, newly released on DVD, director Àlex Ollé from the groundbreaking Spanish theatre group La Fura Dels Baus takes an edgier and more political approach to this tragic love story set amid a clash of cultures. Here we are in the present day and the passionate, unscrupulous Pinkerton is a shiny-suited salesman intent on building a housing development in Nagasaki. Butterfly sports a full body tattoo, denim shorts and a Stars and Stripes T-shirt. For the first act the clever set is a grove of bamboo atop a grassy knoll. For the second act everything is different. No more nature – it’s all building sites,…