For Claude Debussy, the imaginative life was real life. A musical pantheist and revolutionary, he sensed the very heart of the centre of natural phenomena, their ‘inscape’ or essence; and seeking, as he put it, to ‘express the inexpressible’, he longed to liberate music ‘from the barren traditions that stifle it’. Such fantasy and freedom […]

‘Operatic justice’, writes J.B. Steane in his informative and amusing note for this album, ‘is a law unto itself, and the baritone has been prominent among its victims. Unlucky in love, he is seen in the most favourable light as a father-figure and is otherwise all too often the villain of the piece. He may […]

This is a 50-year retrospective (1950–2000) of great Wagner singing on Decca and Deutsche Grammophon featuring twelve extracts from eight operas (including all four operas of the ‘Ring’ cycle) with nine great singers. Wagner’s knowledge of heroes derived from two sources: the myths of ancient Greece and the sagas and poetry of northern Europe. In both […]

Although Pierre Monteux was a notable exponent of both Beethoven and the modern French school, it was with the Ballets Russes that his name was linked. Further, when he was conducting French repertoire in American theatres (particularly at the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1917 to 1919), he also took on the premières of […]

During the 1950s, 60s and 70s Decca recorded several LPs of recitals by both well and lesser-known opera singers of the day. This collection of famous opera arias, issued across two volumes, includes several of the singers known, in the main, to connoisseurs. The present volume features three singers represented by their 1950s recital discs: […]

Richard Strauss came of age as a song composer in his late teens with his lushly upholstered Op. 10, set to poems by the obscure nineteenth-century versifier, Hermann von Gilm. In 1887, he started to give lessons to a promising young soprano, Pauline de Ahna, daughter of a retired general (and woe betide anyone who […]