Composers have always relied on piano transcriptions as a means of bringing selected extracts from large-scale dramatic works to the attention of a wider audience than would otherwise be possible and Prokofiev was no exception. Although he craved success as a composer of the stage and published a total of seventeen operas and ballets, he […]

The seventeen ‘Études-tableaux’ date from the last decade of Rachmaninov’s life in Russia. By this time he had completed Preludes in each of the major and minor keys and was ready to move in a slightly different direction. By qualifying the term with the word ‘tableau’, Rachmaninov seemed to be suggesting the introduction of a […]

The brief but close friendship between Chausson and Debussy was based, it would seem, on the attraction of opposites. The bourgeois, god-fearing, happily married Chausson, living on inherited money in a spacious apartment on the fashionable Boulevard de Courcelles, was free to pursue high-minded, respectable projects like his Symphony in B flat, declaring his allegiance […]

Elena Souliotis, hailed as a successor to Maria Callas, resembled a comet that flashed brightly across the operatic scene and was all too soon extinguished. With a lifelong love of horseriding and the outdoors, she often commented that she preferred animals to people.  She spent much of her childhood in the spectacular garden of her […]

A real rarity – this. Verdi, famous for his operatic masterpieces, also found time to scale down his stage sentiments to the recital hall (or, in his time, the salon) to write songs. Throughout the 19th century, Italian opera composers wrote songs for the salon as part of their stock-in-trade. The texts were mostly conventional, […]

Both of the marvellous cello concertos in this recording, written while Haydn was in the service of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy ‘The Magnificent’, have had checkered careers. In fact, had you asked at any point in the past 200 years how many cello concertos Haydn wrote, the answer would have varied from ‘None’ to ‘Six’. As […]

The eighteen songs included in this recording of Schwanengesang all belong to the last three years of Schubert’s life. The earliest of them, Am Fenster, was written in March 1826, while the last, Die Taubenpost, was finished only a few weeks before his death on 19 November 1828. Fourteen of them, seven by Ludwig Rellstab, […]

‘Rodelinda’ stems from a period of great creativity in Handel’s life, 1724-25, following quickly on ‘Giulio Cesare and Tamerlano’ although it met with only moderate success. One of its first revivals was via the German Handel Society in the 1920s and then the Handel Opera Society revived it again, with a cast including Joan Sutherland, during […]

One of the most peerless Mozartians of our time, Felicity Lott, has been one of the foremost sopranos to essay the composer’s major roles in the opera house. Complementing these is her magnificent disc of concert arias as well as Mozart’s beloved motet ‘Exsultate, jubilate’ and arias from two of the composer’s lesser-known operas. The […]

‘Operatic justice’, writes J.B. Steane in his informative and amusing note for this album, ‘is a law unto itself, and the baritone has been prominent among its victims. Unlucky in love, he is seen in the most favourable light as a father-figure and is otherwise all too often the villain of the piece. He may […]

Jean-Baptiste Duval of the Venetian Republic’s French Embassy records that on Christmas Eve 1607, Midnight Mass in St. Mark’s was celebrated by the light of more than one thousand candles, sixty huge torches and silver lamps. He counted no less than eight ‘choirs’ of voices and instruments sounding back and forth across the gilded vaults […]

The story of the birth of Jesus more than two thousand years ago has been the source of inspiration for countless poets and musicians, as well as practitioners of other forms of art. The infant, born of a virgin in a lowly cattle shed, because there was no room in the inn; the angel of […]