A lyric tragedy in three acts by Gaetano Donizetti, libretto by Salvatore Cammarano. Roberto Devereux was composed in the summer of 1837, the year, according to biographers, in which Donizetti seems to have suffered most, having lost his third son and his adored wife Virginia Vasselli. The opera made its debut at the San Carlo Theatre in Naples on October 28th in the same year and was a great success. The rehearsals of the original performance were postponed for a month due to censorship of the decapitation scene of the leading actor.
The exceptional nature and high artistic quality of this performance justify publication of this video even though the filming was done only to preserve the performance for Teatro Regio's archives and therefore offers few close-up shots and occasionally unclear lighting.
In 1907 Florent Schmitt composed music to accompany a ‘mimodrame’ danced by Loïe Fuller, La Tragédie de Salomé . His score is bursting with colour, energy and voluptuousness – and also with oriental influences stemming from his travels to Morocco and Constantinople, where he discovered the howling dervishes. The final scene features the heart-rending ‘Chant d’Aïça’, an oriental melody sung by a soprano. This music, though bold and modern for the listeners of 1907, nonetheless aroused the admiration of another composer, Igor Stravinsky, to whom Schmitt dedicated the Symphonic Suite he subsequently derived from the work. However, Alain Altinoglu, at the helm of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra of which he has been Music Director since 2021, has chosen to record the original version of this landmark of early twentieth-century French music. The beautiful Chant élégiaque , in its 1911 version for cello and large orchestra, completes this programme.
It has often been said that music is a universal language; it is not, though, universally understood as a mother tongue, it is only universally spoken thus. So one must always attempt to hear it like something new, not quite familiar with a tourist's perception. Let's travel, then, and imagine some interesting encounters, where a German Brahms would understand a French Saint-Saëns as much as a Russian Glière, where a Belgian Jongen would make himself understood to an Austrian Kreisler as much as to a British Elgar, and where a trombonist and a pianist would understand themselves mutually. The listener, then, will have the creative opportunity to impart these familiar and less familiar sounds with significance while surrendering to the sheer pleasure of their beauty.
Heinrich VIII. als Oper? Da erhofft man sich einen großen Historienschinken - und man bekommt einen großen Historienschinken. Einen der feinsten Güte allerdings. Für seine 1883 uraufgeführte Oper hat der anglophilie Saint-Saëns sogar in der Bibliothek des Buckingham Palace recherchiert - von wo er schließlich die choralartige Leitmelodie für seine schillernde Hauptfigur mitbrachte. Spannend an der mit gediegenstem Handwerk ausgeführten Oper ist, dass sich Komponist und Librettist auch darüber hinaus spürbar für die historischen Hintergründe interessierten.
In this beautiful album, Alain and Diego reinvent beloved romances that we thought we knew well, sublime haunting melodies that we never tire of listening to. Demonstrating a subtle art of suspense, they infiltrate each song by stretching the melody to the extreme, delicately dilating time.
Alain Altinoglu and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra have begun to record the complete symphonies of Shostakovich, starting with his Fourth and Fifth symphonies. Shostakovich dared to express human suffering, passion, fear and catastrophe in his music, but always asking the same nagging question: what is man? In this sense, these two symphonies open with a question — an idea of martyrdom that was to become one of the central ideas of his later symphonies and, of course, of his Lady Macbeth of Mzensk. Both symphonies are dated between 1935-1937 when Shostakovich was in his thirties; this was one of the darkest and most difficult phases of his life, marked as it was by the repercussions of some of his writings and the arrest of many people close to him, including members of his family.
Alain Bashung (born 1 December 1947 – 14 March 2009) was a French singer, songwriter and actor. Alain Bashung was the son of a Breton factory worker and an Algerian Kabyle father, whom he never knew. His mother remarried, and at the age of one, Bashung was sent to Strasbourg to live with his new stepfather's parents. He spent his childhood in the countryside. A multi-platinum artist, Bashung received three awards during the ceremony at the Paris Zenith, including best male artist, best album for "Bleu Pétrole" (Barclay/Universal) and best live show. He spent his career singing a pop-chanson repertoire. more … Wikipedia > YouTube