Berlioz Carnevale Romano

The gleaming smile in the cover shot belongs to a young mezzo-soprano coasting at the top of her game, thrilled at the chance to show off in the 400-year-old Teatro Olimpico in Vicenze. The cheers interspersed throughout this June 1998 concert are her adoring fellow Italians. Count yourself lucky to be able to join them and Cecilia Bartoli with a recording that faithfully reflects the scrumptious range of both her voice and emotional dynamics.

In this fascinating book, Fra Carnevale—heretofore a mysterious, quasi-legendary figure—emerges as a well-defined and pivotal artist in Renaissance Florence. In presenting their case, the authors take the reader from the workshop of Filippo Lippi in Florence to Urbino, capital of Federico da Montefeltro’s duchy in the region of the Marches. It was a road most memorably traveled by Piero della Francesca, who worked in Florence in 1439 and became Federico’s favorite artist. This book shows that other lesser known artists like Fra Carnevale also took the same path…

The Carnival of Venice in 1729 was quite unlike any other. Over a period of two months, opera houses went into a frenzy of competition to show off the most famous singers of the day, including the legendary castrato Farinelli who made his astonishing Venetian debut. Several of the most fashionable composers rose to the occasion, writing ravishing music for spectacular productions which often pitted the singers against each other in breathtaking displays of virtuosity. The results were sensational; one tour de force followed another in an atmosphere of fevered excitement and the adoring public lapped it up.

Sir Simon Rattle leads the London Symphony Orchestra and a world-class line-up of soloists in a new recording of Berlioz’s unique La damnation de Faust.

Hector Berlioz - Symphonie fantastique / Harold en Italie / 5 Overtures
Donals McInnes / Leonard Bernstein - OrNat de France / LSO - Andre Previn
2xCD | EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 706 MB | Full Artwork: 52 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: EMI "double fforte" # 7143 5 73338 2 5 | Country/Year: Europe 1999
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic

Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Grande messe des morts (Requiem). Berlioz made significant contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Instrumentation. He specified huge orchestral forces for some of his works, and conducted several concerts with more than 1,000 musicians. He also composed around 50 songs. His influence was critical for the further development of Romanticism, especially in composers like Richard Wagner, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and many others.

This set is self-recommending. The names of Charles Munch and Hector Berlioz evoke the same respect and admiration as Bernstein/Mahler, Beecham/Delius, or Kempe/Strauss, and with good reason. For many years virtually any of these performances could be listed as a prime recommendation, even in a sometimes very crowded field, and the only point worth mentioning in connection with the latest reissue is the fact that RCA finally has gotten it right and included all of Munch's Boston Berlioz recordings. This means that, unlike the previous box, this one includes the stereo Roméo et Juliette (plus the first, mono one) as well as the second (and finer) Symphonie fantastique from 1962.
–David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com