Posts tagged as "alessandro-scarlatti"

Songs for Courtiers and Cavaliers

July 15, 2019

Three L’Oiseau-Lyre LPs celebrating the art of a much-loved contralto, newly remastered and compiled together for the first time, including material new to CD. The history of British contraltos on record, extends beyond Kathleen Ferrier to Constance Shacklock and before her Dame Clara Butt but their select number was joined in the 1950s by Helen […]

Sound the Trumpets

March 12, 2019

A trumpet and organ spectacular: three original Argo and DG albums on a generous, newly compiled 2-CD set. In Baroque works generally, the trumpet is always accompanied by drums both of these instruments having strong associations with military music. The organ, on the other hand, is primarily associated with the church and it is within […]

Brava Berganza!

March 16, 2018

A newly remastered collection of four original Decca albums featuring the Spanish mezzo-soprano at the height of her powers in the repertoire most associated with her, from Rossini to folk and popular songs from her native Spain. Born in 1935, Teresa Berganza was in her mid-twenties when she made the recordings on this album, yet […]

Mr. Bach at Vauxhall Gardens

September 11, 2017

A pair of L’Oiseau-Lyre albums reissued together, including several items making their first appearance on Decca CD. The soprano, Jennifer Vyvyan, was taught at the Royal Academy of Music in London by Roy Henderson, coach of Kathleen Ferrier. With Henderson’s help she formed a secure technique and quickly won acclaim for both operatic and oratorio […]

Handel, A. Scarlatti: Italian Cantatas

May 25, 2016

These delightful Cantatas have very familiar tunes that Handel was later to reuse in other works, so many of them are instantly recognisable. They also elicit some of the most visceral singing imaginable from Helen Watts.

Bach: Guitar Suites Nos. 1 & 3; Scarlatti: Sonata in E minor

April 29, 2016

The world’s foremost exponent of the guitar, John Williams, is featured here in some of his earliest recordings, where he strums effortlessly, Suites by Bach, a tiny Gavotte by Scarlatti (senior) and a transcription of a keyboard sonata by Scarlatti (junior).

Arie Antiche

April 29, 2016

The sequence of Italian operas on this recording take us from the birth of opera at the end of the sixteenth century to the first flowerings of the Classical period nearly 200 years later. The extraordinary power and agility of Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s voice comes fully into its own on this recording, allowing for a richness […]

Serenata Tebaldi

March 7, 2016

It is difficult to dissociate the pure, warm tones of Renata Tebaldi’s voice from her usual operatic repertoire – the heroines of the Italian lyric stage of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which, thanks to her exceptional vocal and dramatic endowment, she interpreted so superbly. That these unforgettable portrayals were not just the product […]