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Your guide to classical music online
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Your guide to classical music online
Franz Liszt’s solo piano transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies may not exactly be standard repertoire, yet more and more pianists are committing them to disc.
The possibility of Leonardo Vinci (1690-1730) ever being counted among the world’s great composers is pretty slim; he composed almost three dozen operas—both buffe and
The curtain rises and we are…nowhere, but it’s very light and bright. Scenery and costumes are black, white, silver, and gold, and variations within those
Anton Rubinstein’s large-scale works often suggest Mendelssohn’s harmonic idiom channeled through Russian late Romanticism. In other words, Tchaikovsky’s exuberance and energy minus the memorable tunes.
Was the audience at the premiere of this opera in 1819 half-dead or half-deaf? It ran a few performances but was so badly received that
If you search the catalog of Donizetti’s operas you probably won’t find this one; in fact, it’s a two-years-later, Neapolitan reworking of his 1824 opera
The Navarra-born Emilio Arrieta, well-known as a composer of zarzuelas (Marina, from 1887, is his best-known work), was born in 1823 and studied at the
Boito’s Mefistofele is an uneven work, dramatically fragmented, episodic almost to a fault. But at the same time it is so perfectly an echt-Italian opera
The 16-year-old Mozart hardly can be expected to plumb any true emotional depths in this opera, composed for Milan in 1772. But it was a
This unique recording, however valuable you eventually decide the undertaking, should be heard by all opera lovers. In 1927, opera intendant Lothar Wallerstein took over
