Anna

In 1973, soprano Beverly Sills, tenor Stuart Burrows, Paul Plishka (baritone) and Shirley Verrett (mezzo-dramatic soprano), joined talents to make a powerfully dramatic opera about the tragedy of Anne Boylen at the hands of Henry the 8th. It was a great success in the New York City Opera and to this day, no other operatic forces have since rivaled them…

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Naples’ fame as a musical centre attracted travellers, composers, instrumentalists and virtuoso singers alike. Among the aspiring musicians, the most highly-trained and sought-after were the castrati, promising boys aged between 8 and 12 who were subjected to an operation intended to preserve the exceptionally pure timbre of their treble voice. Forever virginal beings whose superhuman voices mesmerized their listeners they were nicknamed angiolilli, ‘little angels’, and sang in the most important churches and theatres of ‘Castrapolis’, a term coined to describe the southern capital and its high concentration of castrato sopranos.

Constantly in search of eclectic and meaningful programmes, the soprano Anna Prohaska here celebrates ‘life in death’. An ambitious programme, conceived with Robin Peter Müller and his ensemble La Folia, which takes us on a journey across the centuries and through many different countries, with French chansons of the Middle Ages (including one by Guillaume de Machaut), seventeenth-century Italian pieces by Luigi Rossi, Francesco Cavalli and Barbara Strozzi, German composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dietrich Buxtehude, Christoph Graupner, Franz Tunder) and the English luminaries Henry Purcell… plus John Lennon and Paul McCartney. A musical and spiritual quest that even takes in a detour to North America with a universally known song by Leonard Cohen.

Ignaz’s is probably the least well-documented life of the Lachner brothers who numbered Franz and Vinzenz and who were born in Bavaria. Ignaz was a string player – violin and viola – and worked in Munich until Franz managed to secure him a job in Vienna in 1826. He composed and travelled widely, spending a period in Frankfurt between 1861 and 1875 where he conducted Wagner operas which he then cut to fit local taste. Though he achieved a degree of renown during his lifetime Lachner’s works have sunk almost without trace and I doubt whether many, if any, are now in print.