A feast of Viennese operetta on two Decca albums, newly remastered and reissued complete. Born in Bratislava – Pressburg, as it was in 1901 – Anton Paulik became a reassuring presence for decades. In the pit at the ‘lighter’ Viennese lyric theatres, he could make the music of the ‘Waltz King’ and his successors sparkle […]

Gifted with great beauty and a natural stage presence, Hilde Gueden was unfailingly easy on the ear as well as the eye. With her creamy tone and ability to spin the silvery upper-register sonority needed for her Strauss roles, she was a natural successor to Elisabeth Schumann, Lotte Schöne and Adele Kern. Fortunately for posterity, […]

Light opera and musical theatre rub shoulders in this delightful compendium of favourites from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. With a few exceptions, such as Lehár’s ‘Merry Widow’, many of the operettas from which these songs and arias are taken are largely forgotten and seldom performed but their ‘hits’ remain evergreen. This reissue includes the […]

These recordings of the voices of Inge Borkh and Ljuba Welitsch are very fine examples of the art of the dramatic soprano from the 1950s and early 1960s. Borkh acquired a considerable reputation as Aida, Tosca, Turandot, and Medea in Cherubini’s opera of the same name, as well as Leonora in Fidelio. On this anthology, […]