Sûpâ Mario Yosshî Airando

Mixing classical and contemporary sound, Mario Batkovic seeks to explore the sonic possibilities of the accordion, without effects or loops, rather through a mutualist symbiotic relationship between man and instrument. Challenging, hypnotic and grandiose; Batkovic’s symphonic vision is unique and he has received widespread critical acclaim, including Rolling Stone magazine who voted his self-titled debut album in the Top 10 ‘Best Avant Albums of 2017’.

Les Vêpres Siciliennes is one of Verdi’s misunderstood operas. It is usually presented to audiences today as I vespri Siciliani - that is, in a clumsy and pedestrian Italian translation and as such gives a false representation of Verdi’s original concept. This opera was composed for the Paris Opera to a libretto by Eugene Scribe, one of the greatest poets of the day and Charles Duveyrier. Verdi embraces the French idiom – the musical forms, the orchestration, the vocal writing – with the same grandeur and sense of occasion as Rossini and Meyerbeer before him. Certainly to give an opera in translation is no crime but to continually deprive the public of this particularly beautiful marriage of text and music is close to criminal. This is the third in the Verdi Originals series and this BBC recording of the opera finally restores the original French libretto.

Recently, the E major Symphony has often been counted as Schubert’s 7th symphony. Unlike his other symphonic fragments, the Symphony in E major exists in a complete draft from the first to the last bar in all four movements. More recently, the symphony became accessible to a wider public again in the completed version by Brian Newbould (1982). Now the Austrian composer Richard Dünser, together with the conductor Mario Venzago, has presented a new version of the symphony fragment. The less inspired middle movements have been replaced by supplemented drafts from the year of Schubert’s death. The result: a «new» great symphony by Schubert with a playing time of over 40 minutes; an original and gripping work that immediately convinces with its idiomatic and formal unity.

This is not exactly the Mario Lanza "best-of" album its title might imply; it consists of recordings made during the last 18 months of the great crossover tenor's life, when he was beginning to suffer serious effects from the health problems that killed him in the fall of 1959. Still, it's hard to hear much of an effect from those problems a diminution of sheer vocal power in the selections from Rudolf Friml's musical The Vagabond King that make up the second half of the disc, perhaps, but no loss of the singer's broad, generous lyric impulse.