Classical Theatre

Copland began his Music for the Theatre in May 1925 in New York City, but the bulk of the composition was written at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire during the summer. Having been impressed with Copland's earlier Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1924), conductor Sergey Koussevitzky (1874-1951) urged the League of Composers to commission an orchestral piece from Copland, to be performed the following season.

Halevy's Noé is another one of those operas that is rather obscure, but doesn't deserve to be. One may criticise it for the story stretching slightly longer than it needed to be, and occasionally one can tell that it was left incomplete, and the music not having any memorable arias (similar problems with Clari), but the story itself is quite good, after all it is based on the biblical story of Noah and the music is beautiful, it is unmistakably Halevy but Bizet's (who was responsible for completing the opera) style does come through in the orchestration.

Making full use of Drottningholm Theatre's unique 17th century Baroque theatre machinery, as well as his deep creative understanding of the profound drama of the work, stage director Pierre Audi creates a production of Zoroastre that completely accords with the spirit of Rameau. True to the form of the tragédie lyrique, choreographer Amir Hosseinpour's dances perfectly match the weight and meaning of both plot and music. The ensemble, Les Talens Lyriques, reinforced with musicians from the Drottningholm Court Theatre Orchestra and Chorus, is expertly and passionately led into the musical stratosphere by musical director Christophe Rousset. This intensely dramatic production is captured live in vibrant High Definition video and true surround sound.

Boris Godunov is the quintessential Russian opera and brings to the stage one of the most curious episodes in the history of 16th-century Russia. After Mussorgsky's death in 1881, the work was revised by Rimsky-Korsakov whose version is sung in this performance.

David Lang's the little match girl passion, for vocal quartet doubling on percussion instruments, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. It's a strong, striking piece with a surprisingly potent emotional punch. Part of its effectiveness derives from the story itself, which is so achingly poignant that it can hardly fail to raise a lump in the throat. The text is primarily compiled from the story by Hans Christian Andersen and from familiar sections from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, which sound fresh and new in English translation. Lang's clear-eyed avoidance of sentimentality saves the story from the bathos into which it could easily sink in a less skillful musical setting.

A lyric tragedy in three acts by Gaetano Donizetti, libretto by Salvatore Cammarano. Roberto Devereux was composed in the summer of 1837, the year, according to biographers, in which Donizetti seems to have suffered most, having lost his third son and his adored wife Virginia Vasselli. The opera made its debut at the San Carlo Theatre in Naples on October 28th in the same year and was a great success. The rehearsals of the original performance were postponed for a month due to censorship of the decapitation scene of the leading actor.

Hearing an album of Bach arias sung by a countertenor may not be essential for every listener. Many of the high arias from Bach's cantatas weren't the kind of operatic pieces that called for a muscular male voice comparable to those that have tackled Handel's arias in similar collections, and Bach, at least much of the time, wrote for female vocalists. If you enjoy countertenor singing, however, this release by Canadian singer Daniel Taylor may be the Bach album of choice. Taylor succeeds precisely because he doesn't try to hit you over the head with acrobatics. His voice is rich, smooth, and lyrical, and it is deployed to maximum effect in music that seems to reflect the almost sensuous approach Bach took to the depiction of religious contentment.

Adolphe Adam composed more than 70 operas, of which a small handful still enjoy some currency on the French stage; most have been little seen outside of their native land and are seldom recorded, and some have never been revived since their first productions, if they were so given. This may lead some to believe these works must either be hopelessly dated or "too French" to travel. The video company Kultur, however, is helping expand that narrow view of French theater through its L'Opera Français series, which by 2008 was up to eight titles. This series really fills a major void in the operatic repertoire and makes accessible to international audiences the distinctively French form of opéra-comique, a frothy, deliberately silly type of entertainment that is about as close to "popular" culture as high culture ever gets.

Alessandro Scarlatti's celebrated Stabat mater was commissioned by a confraternity of aristocrats, the Cavalieri della Vergine dei Dolori, for its annual Lenten service at the Franciscan church of San Luigi in Naples. It remained in use until the confraternity commissioned Pergolesi to compose his famous setting to supplant Scarlatti's old-fashioned music. Both Pergolesi and Scarlatti composed for limited resources, each using two solo voices, two violins and basso continuo. Scarlatti's setting is by no means inferior to Pergolesi's but remains much less familiar, despite several excellent recordings.