The Real Falstaff

Claudio Abbado’s career with Deutsche Grammophon stretched back over more than four decades. He was as much a man of the theater as he was one of the greatest of all late 20th century symphonic conductors, and many of his opera recordings remain unsurpassed in the catalog. Building on the huge success of Claudio Abbado – The Symphony Edition, comes The Opera Edition: 60 CDs presenting Maestro’s complete opera recordings for Deutsche Gramophone and Decca.

Sir John Falstaff is the hero in this compilation of extracts from Shakespeare's 'Henry IV' and other plays, made into a connected story of Falstaff's career as young Prince Hal's drinking companion. The massive knight roisters with and without the prince, philosophizes comically, goes to war (in his own fashion), and meets his final disappointment, set in a real-looking late-medieval England.

Celebrating the work of Italy's greatest musical dramatist, this set of 12 operas includes definitive performances from some of the finest Verdi singers of our age, in productions which reflect the contemporary richness of our perspective of the composer as both a man of his time, inspired to reflect the familial tensions and revolutionary fervor of his homeland, and also a man of theatrical genius as timeless as his adored Shakespeare, whose anti-heroes Macbeth and Falstaff stand as the poles of tragedy and comedy in this survey of modern stagings.

Antonio Pappano and his Orchestra e Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi with this programme of sacred choral music. The repertoire consists of the Four Sacred Pieces and, with soprano Maria Agresta as the soloist, the 1880 Ave Maria and the original version of Libera me from the Messa da Requiem. Pappano and his forces will perform this programme on 20 July at the Royal Albert Hall for the 2013 BBC Proms.

Mula is blessed with superb poise and wonderful assurance together with a tremendous ability to emotionally affect the listener.
Lyric-coloratura soprano Inva Mula has released an alluring recital of French and Italian arias for the Virgin Classics label. ‘Courtesan’ might be a more appropriate title for the disc as by my reckoning four of the heroine roles operate in that profession.
– Michael Cookson, MusicWeb International