Abbate Opera

Erato brings you an album now available for digital formats featuring Busoni's 'Arlecchino' and Puccini's 'Turandot'. Despite Busoni's short opera being overshadowed by Puccini's masterpiece, Kent Nagano give a splendid rendition of the two works and showcases their musical qualities with a stellar opera vocal cast; Susanne Mentzer, Philippe Huttenlocher and more!

Erato brings you an album now available for digital formats featuring Busoni's 'Arlecchino' and Puccini's 'Turandot'. Despite Busoni's short opera being overshadowed by Puccini's masterpiece, Kent Nagano give a splendid rendition of the two works and showcases their musical qualities with a stellar opera vocal cast; Susanne Mentzer, Philippe Huttenlocher and more!

This beautifully conceived program brings together the complete works for piano duet by three major American composers: Edward MacDowell (1860-1908), Amy Beach (1867-1944) and Samuel Barber (1910-1981).

Franco Alfano was a major musician and teacher who enjoyed considerable success with his operas during his lifetime, but who has been overlooked for decades. Generally regarded as the regenerator of the Italian art song, the works featured in this album offer a generous overview of Alfano’s vocal output, from his Opus 1 Cinq mélodies, written in 1896 when he was a twenty-one-year-old student at Leipzig, to Due liriche per canto, violoncello e pianoforte from 1949, five years before his death.

The eminent teacher and theoretician Ferruccio Busoni was revered throughout all Europe at the turn of the century, but his unclassifiable music became overshadowed by other avant-garde movements such as the Second Viennese school. By 1916, his unconventional, innovative opera Arlecchino is a caustic farce about the war, and includes sprechgesang that very much inspired him since he held a performance of his friend Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire in his own house. The featured version is conducted by Sir John Michael Pritchard and was the first ever to be put on record.

The eminent teacher and theoretician Ferruccio Busoni was revered throughout all Europe at the turn of the century, but his unclassifiable music became overshadowed by other avant-garde movements such as the Second Viennese school. By 1916, his unconventional, innovative opera Arlecchino is a caustic farce about the war, and includes sprechgesang that very much inspired him since he held a performance of his friend Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire in his own house. The featured version is conducted by Sir John Michael Pritchard and was the first ever to be put on record.