Shinzo wo Sasageyo

Not being a lifelong Wagner devotee, I'm not sure if this particular performance has been released before or not, but I do know that it was included in a 2013 9-title release of Wagner operas recorded live from The Met from 1937 through 1954.

Why this performance? 3 words: Flagstad, Melchior, Huehn. I would add to that Leinsdorf, especially since the recording quality is so bad; his faster-than-the-norm tempi help cut through the densely muddy sound quality.

PENTATONE presents Telemann’s rarely-performed opera Miriways (1728) with a stellar cast and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin conducted by Bernard Labadie. Star vocalists such as André Morsch (Miriways), Robin Johannsen (Sophi), Sophie Karthäuser (Bemira), Lydia Teuscher (Nisibis) and Michael Nagy (Murzah) offer a string of beautiful baroque arias and scenes in this Germanlanguage opera. Miriways is a piece about love, duty and truthfulness, and was based on political events from that time in Afghanistan and Persia that actually made headlines in European newspapers, demonstrating the eighteenth-century fascination for the Orient. The opera was recorded live during the Telemann Festival Hamburg in 2017.

KENSO is from Japan. The music combines a Progressive jazz-rock or a Progressive rock mixed with jazz. The emphasis is on performance and improvisation with complex themes, breaks, elaborated developments and arrangements remind HATFIELD AND THE NORTH and BRAND X. The musicianship is excellent…

The most famous and enduringly successful composer of nineteenth-century light music, Johann Strauss II captivated not only Vienna but the whole of Europe and America with his abundantly tuneful waltzes, polkas, quadrilles and marches. This unique collection brings together for the first time ever his entire orchestral output. The Strauss Edition, originally fifty-two separate releases on the Marco Polo label, represented a milestone in recording history. It is celebrated by this beautiful box-set.

Die Ruinen von Athen (‘The Ruins of Athens’) was composed to celebrate the opening of the new German theatre in Pest in 1812. Designed to accompany the play of that name by August von Kotzebue, its incidental music is substantial enough to form a kind of one-act Singspiel and is full of attractive arias, duets and choruses and includes the famous Turkish March. Though the work’s theme was rooted in Greek mythology, in reality it was explicitly political in nature, celebrating Pest as ‘the new Athens’. This is the first ever recording of the work with full narration.