Coloratura Spectacular

Music Of The Spheres – The new album from the British band, Coldplay, available on CD and LP. The band's ninth LP, produced by Max Martin, features twelve tracks, five of which are represented by emojis. In May, the band released “Higher Power” - the first single from Music Of The Spheres - which has been streamed more than 160 million times and was performed live in New York on the Today Show, Macys 4th of July Spectacular and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon . The band have also revealed the imminent release of an album track called “Coloratura” to be followed by a new single in September.

Music Of The Spheres – The new album from the British band, Coldplay, available on CD and LP. The band's ninth LP, produced by Max Martin, features twelve tracks, five of which are represented by emojis. In May, the band released “Higher Power” - the first single from Music Of The Spheres - which has been streamed more than 160 million times and was performed live in New York on the Today Show, Macys 4th of July Spectacular and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon . The band have also revealed the imminent release of an album track called “Coloratura” to be followed by a new single in September.

Known for her idiosyncratic performances of baroque repertoire and eccentric personal style, the German coloratura soprano Simone Kermes trained in her native Leipzig, with early successes including the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition. Bach has not, however, figured prominently in her career since then – Kermes gravitated towards Vivaldi, Handel and the Neapolitan composers who wrote for the great castrati, such as Riccardo Broschi, Alessandro Scarlatti and Porpora. (She has recorded several solo albums of such repertoire for Sony, including Dramma, and Colori d’Amore – reviewing the latter, BBC Music Magazine described her as ‘a remarkable artist, charming, fascinating and boldly risk-taking by turns’).

Johann Strauss Junior’s second operetta, Der Carneval in Rom, premiered in 1873 only one year before Die Fledermaus, and while the music is enjoyable enough, with several nice tunes, there is little in the score to presage the gorilla blockbuster soon to come. For one thing, Strauss wrote the music in the more romantic style of light opera because the work was originally scheduled to be mounted at the Vienna court opera, a place of more serious mien than the Theater an der Wien, then the home of the comic-oriented Viennese operetta.

Here are two of Rossini's "secular" cantatas: "The Lament of Harmony on the Death of Orpheus" for tenor, male chorus, and orchestra, written when he was a 16-year-old conservatory student, and the far more substantial "Wedding of Thetis and Peleus," one of many such pieces he composed for special occasions, commissioned for the marriage of an Italian princess to a French prince. Both consist of primarily short, separate, contrasting numbers, most of which would be perfectly at home in the opera house.

Imelda de'Lambertazzi (1830) was written just before Donizetti's first great international success, Anna Bolena, and it remains one of his many operas that has never made it into the repertoire. In his illuminating program notes, Jeremy Commons argues that Imelda was probably Donizetti's most forward-looking, even avant-garde opera; the composer was determined to create music that matched the demands of the drama, and therefore ignored many of the operatic conventions audiences had come to expect. It's no surprise, then, that it was badly received, and has rarely been revived.

In spring 2011, the first-ever performances at New York's Metropolitan Opera of Rossini's Le Comte Ory brought standing ovations and critical-acclaim. The spectacular trio of Juan Diego Florez, Diana Damrau and Joyce DiDonato ignited vocal and theatrical fireworks. Le Comte Ory tells the story of a libidinous and cunning nobleman who disguises himself first as a hermit and then as a nun ("Sister Colette") in order to gain access to the virtuous Countess Adele, whose brother is away at the Crusades. The 2011 Met production was directed by the Tony Award-winning Broadway director Bartlett Sher, who in recent years has also staged Il barbiere di Siviglia and Les Contes d'Hoffman for the Met. Sher presented the action as an opera within an opera, updated the action by a few centuries and giving the costume designer, Catherine Zuber, the opportunity to create some particularly extravagant headgear. Juan Diego Florez starred as the title role while Diana Damrau plays his love interest, Countess Adele, and Joyce DiDonato was in breeches as his pageboy Isolier. The trio had appeared in Sher's production of Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia.