Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) which Richard Strauss composed with his long-time collaborator, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, received an unenthusiastic premiere in Vienna on 10th October 1919. Hofmannsthal’s complicated and heavily symbolic libretto was cited as one of the problems. However, it is now a standard part of the operatic […]
The first release at super-budget price of this towering performance of the ninth symphony. Many of the recordings in this Beethoven cycle have never before been locally available.
Herbert von Karajan’s mighty ‘Ring’ cycle, here represented through extended highlights allows us to sample Karajan’s choice of different singers for the same character in different operas – Fischer-Dieskau’s Wotan in ‘Das Rheingold’ and Thomas Stewart’s in ‘Siegfried’. There are notes on the music as well as an essay by Karajan expert, Richard Osborne, on […]
Looking back at ‘Tristan und Isolde’ twenty years after its composition, Wagner told his wife Cosima: ‘My model was Romeo and Juliet – nothing but duets!’ He was invoking Bellini’s opera,’I Capuleti e i Montecchi’ which he had conducted many times as a young man. Indeed, there had been much in the Italian master’s legacy that […]
Among the many Heldentenoren spoken of in glowing terms, perhaps none has been so unfairly neglected as Jess Thomas. Full-throated and resplendent, not a hint of strain, an amazing array of colours in the voice (from sotto voce to overpowering), he possessed an artistry that was not only a thrill in the theatre but that […]
On 11th June 1944, Karl Böhm conducted ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’ at the Vienna State Opera. It was, in his own words, ‘despite the dark shadows cast by the war which was already long since lost, a feast for musical Vienna’. The occasion was the 80th birthday of Richard Strauss which would have undoubtedly been celebrated […]
