This SIX CD collection of 101 favorite tracks is the perfect introduction to the world of opera, including the worlds most famous and popular tenor and soprano arias, duets and choruses. With a running time of over 7 hours of music this box set provides excellent value for money. This delightful collection includes everyones favorite opera highlights, from the lyricism of Puccinis Nessun dorma! and O mio babbino caro, to the power and might of Verdis Anvil Chorus and Wagners Ride of the Valkyries. Features some of the greatest opera singers of the last 50 years, including Luciano Pavarotti, Dame Joan Sutherland, Jussi Bjorling, Kiri Te Kanawa, Placido Domingo and Renata Tebaldi.
Composer Michael William Balfe composed 29 operas, and around 250 other pieces. He is best known for his opera The Bohemian Girl. Balfe’s opera Satanella was his 23rd opera, and was premiered at Covent Garden in 1858. The work is a hybrid of classical opera tradition and stand-alone songs. This release is performed by the John Powell Singers and the Victorian Opera Orchestra under the direction of Richard Bonynge.
La jacquerie is a four-act opera commenced by Édouard Lalo in 1889 to a libretto by Édouard Blau and Simone Arnaud. The opera was unfinished when Lalo died in 1892, and it was completed by Arthur Coquard. The first performance was at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo on March 9, 1895.
Pretty Yende, a rising star soprano with a modern fairy-tale story releases her debut album A Journey. Born in a remote town in South Africa, Yende was first introduced to opera music at the age of sixteen when hearing the Flower Duet from Delibes opera Lakmé in a British Airways commercial.
It’s no secret that soprano Anna Netrebko is one of opera’s true box office draws: Her performances of Il Trovatore last season were among the few nights the Met was completely sold out. But her new CD, Verismo, reveals she is more than just a star; her performances of arias and scenes from Italian opera highlight an artistry that is both subtle and thrilling.
The Opera Rara label devotes itself to just what the name says, not only recording rare operas, but also mounting them in well-financed productions. They've excavated works that promise to reshape the operatic repertory some, and so it may be with this work by Ruggero Leoncavallo, which he preferred to the ubiquitous I Pagliacci. It offers a pure verismo story, featuring the titular character, a French music-hall singer who gets involved in a doomed affair with a married Parisian businessman.
Harri Ahmas is a composer, principal bassoonist with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and an active chamber musician both at home in Finland and abroad. Among the works composed by Ahmas are three symphonies, seven concertos and two chamber operas (Heart Streams and the Snake Ring). In the composers own words - “The story of my chamber opera started with the touching and intricate poetical work Käärmesormus (Snake Ring) by Tittamari Marttinen, which mezzo soprano Ulla Raiskio had found and was impressed with.
With the rise of Romanticism, the topics of opera changed from the mythological fantasy of Baroque operas to the fairytale fantasy which graced the French stage long before Romanticism reached other European nations. Initiated by the Palazzetto Bru Zane, this project is built like a universal fairytale, inspired by Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard, and others, as set to music by French composers of the Romantic period, alternating between famous composers such as Offenbach and Rossini and little known masters like Viardot, Silver, and Isouard. This imaginary opera was conceived and transcribed by Alexandre Dratwicki for piano quartet and two singers- a soprano and a mezzo, the roles of which are performed here by Jodie Devos and Caroline Meng.