Classical Recordings Pg. 6

This is a radical rethinking of Prokofiev’s ballet by choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti and by set and costume designer Fabrizio Plessi. Acknowledging both the familiarity and the...

Dynamic’s engineers came very close to both performers on December 21 and 22, 2009, capturing the smallest tonal nuances of the 1716 Maréchal Berthier Stradivari on...

The primary—indeed, sole—rationale for this release would appear to be the Butterfly of Sena Jurinac. Primarily a specialist in Mozart, Richard Strauss, and the lighter Wagnerian...

The new opera house in Valencia is nothing if not ambitious. Its eye-opening Ring cycle, begun in 2007 and completed in 2009, will be reviewed soon;...

The Pharaoh’s Daughter was premiered in St. Petersburg in 1862 and the ballet was first seen at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow two years later. The...

One of the pleasing things about this disc of Purcell’s small-scale chamber music is the occasional variety of instrumentation. The Ground in Gamut , for instance,...

Both of Rachmaninoff’s large-scale a cappella works, the All Night Vigil (Vespers) and The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom , had difficult beginnings. The Vespers...

Rachmaninoff’s sacred choral output consists of two brief settings of religious poems by A. K. Tolstoy, a “sacred concerto” (the kontakion from the liturgy for the...

One critic’s supernova is another critic’s flash in the pan. For example, I was gratified to see, amid all the hype attending Gustavo Dudamel’s inaugural concert...

The cover shows an almost three-dimensional backlit and spotlighted picture of Vasily Petrenko, holding a baton in his hand placed pensively on his chin, brilliant almost...

You can’t perform a decorous Rachmaninoff Second and make it work. It’s like attempting to put a starched collar on a sunset. The Second Symphony is...

Here we have Gianandrea Noseda’s latest installment in his Chandos Rachmaninoff cycle of symphonies and tone poems. The first release, containing the Symphony No. 1, an...

Ever since winning a gold medal in the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1970, Garrick Ohlsson has been in the forefront of American pianism. He has...

None of these works are flagged as being a world premiere recording, but I can find no others for any of them—nothing on ArkivMusic, nothing in...

As Rameau’s only bona fide set of chamber music, the Pièces de clavecin en concerts of 1741 has received more that its fair share of recordings...

It appears that a slow but steady mini-renaissance of interest in Johann Valentin Rathgeber (1682–1750) is underway. With the exception of an Antes CD released in...

I have to tell you, at the outset of this review, that I moved to this CD immediately after reading Jack Reilly’s book The Harmony of...

This appears to be a winnowed-down selection drawn from a still-available five-disc Decca compilation of recordings made by Janet Baker between 1961 and 1979. England’s best-known...

This is a reissue of Koch 3-7421-2H1, issued in 1998 and reviewed by Paul A. Snook in Fanfare 22:2. Snook generally disliked Revueltas’s “characteristic blend of...

Josef Rheinberger (1839–1901) was a quite conservative German Romantic composer who separated himself from the modernist trends represented by Liszt and Wagner. In reviewing an earlier...

This Salzburg Festival recital was clearly an Event, with a capital E. DG commemorates it by issuing the program complete here in what it calls a...

Jean-Baptiste Robin (b. 1976) is a French composer and organist, currently serving as the organist at Poitiers Cathedral and professor of organ and composition at the...

This second volume from Naxos of the solo piano music of George Rochberg continues to enhance and deepen our view of this composer. It certainly has...

Caprices en form d’études ) seemed a novelty, while now Elizabeth Wallfisch’s new performance on cpo joins two others: Axel Strauss’s on Naxos 8.570958, Fanfare

Philippe Rogier (c.1561–96) was the last Flemish maestro at the court of Philip II. The two major recordings until now included Philip Cave’s version of the...

Johann Rosenmüller (1619–84) is hardly a household name, even for someone versed in 17th-century music. In an age that revolves around pivotal figures such as Heinrich...

There’s much to like, and quite a bit to dislike, in this Barbiere . As most of the former involves the performers and the orchestra, let’s...

Walter Legge, EMI’s most prominent record producer during the ’50s and ’60s, produced many great recordings with such artists as Callas, Klemperer, and Furtwängler besides his...

In the booklet accompanying this release, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore is quoted as saying, “With the costumes that can be kind of tacky, with the sets that...

Here is another Naxos recording of a production from the 2008 Rossini in Wildbad Festival, with the same chorus and orchestra as for the Otello

Rossini’s Otello was premiered on December 4, 1816, and remained one of his most frequently performed operas until the general eclipse of most of his works...

With this release cpo accomplishes two firsts: the premiere recording of any music by Johann Christoph Rothe (1653–1700) and of the earliest known surviving oratorio passions...

Comparing his third and fourth symphonies to one another, Roussel wrote: “It reflects the same tendencies: classical construction, with no aspect of extramusical program, rather great...

This isn’t a new release. CDLX 7114 (the String Quartets Nos. 2 and 4, the Lyric Movement , the Meditations ) were first issued in 2001,...

This pairing of two unabashedly romantic violin concertos—both premiere recordings but written some 60 years apart—is both appropriate and meaningfully instructive in reinforcing the primary power...

Someone once said of the French composer Joseph Bodin de Boismortier that enough nuggets could be found in his music to fashion an ingot of gold....

Antonio Salieri is remembered chiefly as an opera composer and, in popular imagination, for taking down Mozart’s dictation of the Requiem and perhaps knocking off the...

Sven-David Sandström (born in 1942) is perhaps the most important Swedish composer writing predominantly religious music today. His reputation in that area led the Oregon Bach...

During the course of his long life, Alessandro Scarlatti was not only a prolific composer of opera, he wrote more than 700 cantatas, many of which...

Wealthy Romans of the early 18th century responded to a papal ban on opera in typical fashion, by taking it indoors and giving it a new...

Until receiving this disc, I had never heard of Heinrich Kaspar Schmid, a prolific Bavarian composer who lived from 1874 to 1953. The only other pieces...

These two discs, whose German titles translate as Biedermeier Dances and Autumn Leaves , constitute some of Schubert’s last music for piano, most of it composed...

The dynamic young Russian pianist Vassily Primakov is attracting a lot of attention. He has recorded several CDs of diversified repertoire for the Bridge label: Chopin...

In a just-completed review of another Laborie album featuring the Mosaïques Quartet in a program of chamber works by French composer Alexandre Boëly, I stated that...

The German pianist Gerhard Oppitz likes to record complete cycles. Thus far he has given us Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, all of Beethoven’s and Mozart’s sonatas, the...

It was through Dietrich Fischer-Dieskaus’s performances that several generations of listeners, myself included, got to know Schubert’s song cycles, Winterreise in particular. In the bonus interview...

As the story goes, Theodor Leschetizky, the famous teacher of some of the greatest pianists of the 19th and early 20th centuries—Gabrilovich, Friedman, Ney, Moiseiwitsch, Hambourg,...