a Date With The Executioner

This is one of the Decca stereo recordings of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas that does not include dialog. Thanks to the popularity of the work, it is familiar enough that missing the few plot points that occur in dialog doesn't hurt it. However, this is a somewhat disappointing performance and recording by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company compared to the others in this series of reissues. Longtime principal comedian John Reed is Ko-Ko.

Three and a half decades after Diamanda Galás’ first recordings as a solo vocalist, she still talks about her singing as an act of violence. Musing to Rolling Stone about her performance of the folk standard “O Death”—versions of which are included on both of her new records, All the Way and At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem—she describes it as a cycle of destruction. “You keep breaking it and breaking it and breaking it and desiccating it and putting it back together until it becomes a new life form,” she says. “And then you rip it apart again.” It’s an accurate description of that solo piano piece—which traffics in the California-born composer’s longheld affinities for bebop, blues, and stately morbidity—but it’s also a handy summation of the harrowing work Galás has made for her whole career.

Conductor Sir Charles Mackerras has always been a champion of the music of Arthur Sullivan. In the early '90's, he began to record the Gilbert & Sullivan operettas with Telarc. Like the Sargent recordings of the '50's, Mackerras uses mostly opera singers–veterans of Covent Garden and of the English and Welsh National Operas but he secured the services of two veteran Savoyards, Richard Suart and the late Donald Adams. Mackerras planned to record at least seven of the Savoy operas, perhaps more, but was forced to suspend the series due to lack of funding as I understand. This fine recording of The Mikado, fortunately, was one of the four he was able to complete.

A compilation of 20 pieces played only by guitar instrumental music, such as: Johnny Guitar, The Third Man Theme, Un Homme Et Une Femme, Lara's Theme, Zorba's Dance, and more… really melodic compilation…

In a violent, futuristic city where the police have the authority to act as judge, jury and executioner, a cop teams with a trainee to take down a gang that deals the reality-altering drug, SLO-MO.