Opera Now 2005

I do not want to start too many hares running, but I suggest that if a newcomer to opera listened to La Traviata and then Il Trovatore, one after another, he or she would quickly identify the composer as one, no matter the different moods and key register. If the same listener did the same with Die Zauberflöte and La Clemenza di Tito I doubt that the listener would identify the works as being by the same composer.

This unofficial 'Opera Omnia' was released as a four CD boxed set in Italy in 1992, in a blue and gold box, with a colour booklet. It contains live versions of almost every Queen song ever performed live, from a number of different concerts, in chronological order.

Richard Hickox was renowned primarily for his unparalleled service to British music, with a vast discography covering not just the obvious Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Delius but composers whose output seldom gets an airing in the concert hall. I make no comment on the worth of much of the music revealed to us-but if we don’t get to hear it we cannot judge at all!

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett’s Gothic opera The Mines of Sulphur is reminiscent of suspense thrillers from Edgar Allan Poe to Alfred Hitchcock. Love, longing, and dark as well as light comedy abound in this macabre tale of greed and retribution set in a haunted manor house in the West of England. The title of the tale, taken from Shakespeare’s Othello, refers to the theme of gradual corruption.

The tradition of presenting operas in the Arena of Verona was inaugurated by Aida when it was performed there in 1913. The wide-open spaces of this opera-the blue skies and fragrant forests of Ethiopia, the starry nights on the Nile-and its picture of Egypt's ancient civilisation found their ideal setting in the grandeur of this centuries-old Roman amphitheatre and in the open air of Verona's summer nights.

Born in 1921, the composer Ingvar Lidholm is the doyen of Swedish music. We recently released three CDs as a survey of his orchestral works, and now the time has come for this two-disc set of his music for choir a cappella. Containing the absolute majority of Lidholm's works in this genre, this release is also a documentation of the unique collaboration between the composer and the renowned choral conductor Eric Ericson.