Love is connection. Love is gratitude. Love is passion. Love is audacity. These qualities define tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis’ second album with the glorious Red Lily Quintet: For Mahalia, With Love. Whereas Lewis used his transformative talents to illuminate renaissance man George Washington Carver in a whole new way on Jesup Wagon, the groundbreaking 2021 masterpiece that swept most major jazz polls, the saxophonist does the same for the pioneering gospel-music force of nature Mahalia Jackson. But this time it’s personal, because Lewis lived her music growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., playing there in churches as a youth and being nurtured by his grandmother, who had received Mahalia’s singing like a bolt from above.
Olga Borodina sings the role of Dalila here too; her tone in the famous aria Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix is quite ravishing, and she is matched by an heroic performance from Plácido Domingo as Samson. James Levine has an expert grasp of the drama in this 1998 Elijah Moshinsky production from the Metropolitan Opera. There's also some luxury casting in the form of Sergei Leiferkus as Le Grand Prêtre de Dagon and René Pape as Le Vieillard Hébreu. (James Longstaffe)
This staging of Nabucco, the first since 1960 at the MET, featuring the Russian soprano Maria Guleghina was given in the centenary year of Verdi’s death. The production by MET regular Elijah Moshinsky and the sheer power of Verdi’s score drives this opera and brings the drama and its characters to life. James Levine leads the MET Orchestra and the cast is rounded out by two familiar Verdi specialists Juan Pons and Samuel Ramey.
Sir Thomas Beecham's Messiah has become notorious among baroque purists (like this writer) for embodying the worst excesses of pre-1960 Handel performance: ponderous tempos, stentorian opera singers, huge lumbering choruses and orchestras, crashing cymbals, clanging triangles…. Well, we'll need a new straw man: this performance is Wonderful…