Posts tagged as "daniel-auber"

The Age of Bel Canto

February 17, 2022

A groundbreaking Decca album celebrating the glory of both bel canto and the voice of Sutherland in her prime, long unavailable on its own, reissued complete with a booklet introduction from Richard Bonynge. More than a quarter of a century has now passed since Decca remastered ‘The Age of Bel Canto’ among the first releases […]

Romantic French Arias

February 17, 2022

One of Dame Joan Sutherland’s own favourite recordings, long unavailable on its own, reissued with additional material recorded at the Geneva sessions, with rarely seen photographs and a new booklet introduction. In her introduction to this reissue of Sutherland’s 1969 recording of Romantic French Arias, Fiona Janes notes that the album was made just shy […]

Clair de Lune / Waldteufel Waltzes

May 17, 2019

Three Decca albums of popular Romantic classics, remastered complete for CD and compiled for the first time. Recorded at London’s Kingsway Hall early in 1957 and first released in the US by RCA Victor, ‘Overtures in Spades’ was a collection of operatic openers that enjoyed more popular currency then than they do now: Suppé’s ‘Light […]

Auber: Orchestral and Theatre works

August 10, 2017

Compiled from several Decca recordings made between 1964 and 1988, this portrait of Auber was created at Richard Bonynge’s specific request and supervised by him. Most substantial of these recordings is the ballet version which Auber made from his opera ‘Marco Spada’: 65 minutes of scintillating dance music, in the adaptation made by Richard Bonynge […]

Auber: Le Domino noir; Gustave III

August 10, 2017

Through scholarship, performance and recording, Richard Bonynge has done more than any other modern-day musician to advance the cause of Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, the foremost composer of opéra-comique in nineteenth-century Paris. What he wrote was ‘Simple, joyous and unsophisticated music,’ according to Bonynge: this is his sole recording of a complete opera by Auber. ‘Le Domino […]

From Melba to Sutherland: Australian Singers on Record

October 18, 2016

‘From Melba to Sutherland: Australian Singers on Record’ is the first-ever comprehensive survey of the recordings of Australia’s greatest singers – in a unique, new, 4CD set from Decca, complete with biographies of each of the 80 artists, rare photographs, all contained within a 68-page booklet. Why has there been such an extraordinary procession of […]

Ouvertures Françaises

April 22, 2016

Sparkling accounts of famous French overtures, rare and familiar, all recorded in 1960 and part of the Eloquence magnum opus, the ‘Decca Ansermet Legacy’.

Overtures in Hi-Fi

April 20, 2016

The recorded legacy of Albert Wolff is one of the most sought-after by collectors. Of Dutch parentage, but born in Paris, Wolff was something of a polymath: pianist, organist, conductor, composer, and had a long career in recording studios beginning in 1920. His first recordings for Decca, starting in the summer of 1951, were a […]

Pas de Deux

March 15, 2016

While Richard Bonynge has long been associated with opera, particularly with that of the Bel Canto age, he has been one of the most active revivers and conductors of ballet in the 20th and 21st centuries. His recordings of the major Romantic classical ballet scores have been critically acclaimed but he has also been responsible for making […]

Ballet Music and Entr’actes from French Opera

March 12, 2016

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a fertile period for the Bonynge–Sutherland duo. Whilst fulfilling a fiendish concert schedule, they produced a string of opera sets for Decca with leading artists of the day which have become classics of the catalogue: ‘La fille du regiment’ (1968), ‘Lakmé’, ‘Les Huguenots’, ‘Romantic French Arias’ (all 1969!), […]