Driving intensity, rhythmic flair and demonstration-quality sound are brought to the fore in a new anthology of Antal Doráti’s early recordings with the Philharmonia Hungarica on Mercury and Philips. Founded in 1956, the Philharmonia Hungarica emerged from turbulent post-war times as a crack ensemble of émigré Hungarian musicians who had fled Communism for the West. […]
From Adam to Zandonai, from 1954 to 1996, 20 CDs made up of no less than 28 Decca opera recordings, most of them recorded as highlights albums, many long unavailable, newly remastered and all featuring the greatest singers of their age. In bygone years, before 24/7 streaming, recorded music was less readily available than it […]
A feast of Viennese operetta on two Decca albums, newly remastered and reissued complete. Born in Bratislava – Pressburg, as it was in 1901 – Anton Paulik became a reassuring presence for decades. In the pit at the ‘lighter’ Viennese lyric theatres, he could make the music of the ‘Waltz King’ and his successors sparkle […]
Gifted with great beauty and a natural stage presence, Hilde Gueden was unfailingly easy on the ear as well as the eye. With her creamy tone and ability to spin the silvery upper-register sonority needed for her Strauss roles, she was a natural successor to Elisabeth Schumann, Lotte Schöne and Adele Kern. Fortunately for posterity, […]
Although Sutherland and Bonynge gave many memorable performances of ‘The Merry Widow’ on stage, they never recorded it completely. However, this recording – sung in English – offers a choice collection of the opera’s ‘greatest hits’, including ‘Vilja’, the famous waltz and some of the big scenes in the operetta.
A treasury of some of the greatest Lehar recordings from the Decca catalogue, this CD encompasses the entire LP with Holm, Krenn and Paulik plus Pilar Lorengar singing arias from ‘Eva’ and ‘Gypsy Love’. It’s a model of sugar-encrusted elegance of a bygone era.
Light opera and musical theatre rub shoulders in this delightful compendium of favourites from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. With a few exceptions, such as Lehár’s ‘Merry Widow’, many of the operettas from which these songs and arias are taken are largely forgotten and seldom performed but their ‘hits’ remain evergreen. This reissue includes the […]
These recordings of the voices of Inge Borkh and Ljuba Welitsch are very fine examples of the art of the dramatic soprano from the 1950s and early 1960s. Borkh acquired a considerable reputation as Aida, Tosca, Turandot, and Medea in Cherubini’s opera of the same name, as well as Leonora in Fidelio. On this anthology, […]
Several countries have their light operas: the British their Gilbert and Sullivan, the Spanish their zarzuelas, the French their operettes. All of these display quite tight-knit styles but the operetta tradition of Austria and specifically Vienna, is more diffuse, reflecting the differing styles of folk music found in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. The world of […]
