Gia Ford

How often do we hear from the outsider’s perspective? For rising new artist Gia Ford, those figures on the fringes of society are by far the most fascinating. Her songs tell the stories of the downtrodden to the downright dangerous. And through them, we begin to hear familiar, uncomfortable truths about ourselves. Transparent Things is Gia Ford's debut album, and first album release with Chrysalis Records. Produced by Tony Berg (Phoebe Bridgers) at Sound City Studios in LA. Since the release of her first single at the end of 2023, Gia has been championed by a number of tastemaskers, including being chosen in The Independent's Ones To Watch for 2024.

Opera Rara recorded the new critical edition by the Rossini Foundation of Otello. Hugely admired in its day, this highly innovative score contains some of Rossini’s most inspired music. The recording includes the reconstruction of the alternative happy ending (written for Rome in 1820) as well as an aria for Desdemona which the great Giudetta Pasta sang to acclaim in Paris and London.

Antonio Salieri’s Falstaff is not Verdi’s and never will be. That out of the way, it’s a charming evening’s entertainment, occasionally quite funny, with nicely characterized roles, swell, brief melodies, excellent, spicy wind writing (vividly played here on period instruments and recorded in such a way that the sonics favor them), and nice forward propulsion. The action moves quickly and pointedly, the dry recitatives are frequent but never too long, and when they do go on, the cast here is clever and involved enough to make them dramatically viable.

By far the best opera based on Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, is Verdi's Falstaff. But the lazy, cowardly, greedy, overweight, alcohol-soaked, sexually predatory, and somehow (despite everything) endearing antihero is big enough for more than one opera. Salieri's Falstaff is much simpler and smaller in scale than Verdi's, less inventive and energetic. But this is a sophisticated, funny, brightly performed treatment of Falstaff's attempt to woo two married women with identical love notes.

Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle (Falstaff, or The Three Jokes) is a dramma giocoso in two acts by Antonio Salieri, set to a libretto by Carlo Prospero Defranceschi after William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. One of the earliest operatic versions of Shakespeare's play, Salieri's Falstaff is notable for a general compression and streamlining of the original plot, note the absence of the two young lovers, Fenton and Anne, and the addition of a scene in which Mistress Ford pretends to be German to charm Falstaff (actually two such scenes exist, one in a separate score by Salieri was probably omitted from the original Viennese productions). Defranceschi moves the plot and structure away from Elizabethan drama and closer to the standard conventions of late 18th century opera buffa.