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 […]
At a time when Donizetti was represented on the world’s stages by little more than ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ and the recording industry was only beginning to capitalise on public hunger for the sublime art of bel canto, this complete recording of the composer’s first great international success was welcomed as a landmark in the history […]
The first CD release of Kertész’ recording of Mozart’s choral masterwork with some glorious solo singing. The work achieved huge popularity in the 1980s through its pivotal inclusion in the film ‘Amadeus’.
This is one of the most successful and stylish of Don Giovanni recordings. Having sung Donna Anna in her early (Giulini) recording, Sutherland here is, if anything, even more spine-tingling in this role. Bonynge and the English Chamber Orchestra, together with the Ambrosian Singers, really deliver the goods and the rest of the stellar cast […]
Quintessential mezzo-soprano, Marilyn Horne, treats us to a program of great songs from ‘The American Songbook’ – a veritable quilt of many-coloured delights. The arrangements range from the delicate to the lush and the mood ranges from racy fun to religiously uplifting. This CD, one of Decca’s first releases on compact disc, has been excerpted […]
Marilyn Horne’s plum-tinged mezzo and the music of Mahler are inseparable. So far, only the ‘Fahrenden Gesellen’ songs and the ‘Kindertotenlieder’ have made their way to CD (now deleted), so it is appropriate to collect on a single CD, the three masterpieces all performed by the same artist. The ‘Rückert-Lieder’ make their first appearance on […]
Kertész’ orchestral Mozart has been well documented on Eloquence with many releases appearing on CD for the first time. Now, restored to the catalogue, is his dramatic, muscular reading of the ‘Requiem’. Stretching to 79 minutes, the disc is filled out with selections from the composer’s Masonic Music, with the ‘Maurerische Trauermusik’ bearing an uncanny resemblance […]
Since the beginning of opera, the convention of the duet, in which two characters simultaneously express their feelings, has been one of the staple ploys of musical dramatists. Characters may join their voices in a unity of feeling, or in extreme disagreement, or in any one of the thousand shades in between; though in the […]
