Sarah Vaughan was one of the illustrious coterie of female vocalists who spanned the genres of jazz, big band music and sophisticated pop during the post-war era to provide some of the finest music of their times, not only interpreting the Great American Songbook and putting their own individual stamp on it, but continuing to perform top class new material through the musical upheavals of subsequent decades.
This Edition presents the “Magnificent Seven” and the “encore” in optimum technical quality. In the mid-Fifties of the last century, with the Cold War freezing relations between East and West, the English record label Decca decided to record a series of Russian operas with the Belgrade National Opera. Belgrade in the Yugoslavia of those days under Josip Tito was more open to “the West” than the Warsaw Pact countries gathered under the wing of the Soviet Union. The deal had been struck by former Decca manager and successful promoter of east European folklore in the USA, record executive Gerald Severn.
As the possessor of one of the great lyric soprano voices of our time, soprano Renée Fleming is in demand in the world's great opera houses. (It doesn't hurt that she's also lovely and a fine actress.) This album is an outstanding collection of great arias, ravishingly sung.
During the course of an extraordinarily active life and compositional career Niccolò Piccinni embraced not only both comic and serious Italian opera but also, during the course of a 15-year period spent in Paris (1776–1791), adapted his style to tragédie lyrique, thereby becoming an unwitting participant in the rows between his adherents and those of Gluck. Like most 18th-century Neapolitan composers (he was actually born in Bari), Piccinni was a product of the conservatoire system, following which he gained his first operatic successes during the 1750s. In 1758 he broke into wider prominence with Alessandro nelle Indie, an opera seria given in Rome with such success that the composer moved there, embarking on a period of intense operatic activity that reached an early peak with the production in 1761 of his most famous opera, La buona figliuola.
Sarah Vaughan was one of the illustrious coterie of female vocalists who spanned the genres of jazz, big band music and sophisticated pop during the post-war era to provide some of the finest music of their times, not only interpreting the Great American Songbook and putting their own individual stamp on it, but continuing to perform top class new material through the musical upheavals of subsequent decades.