Opera
I have lately developed quite a taste for opera, and the only way I'm going to get to hear it is via DVD's and CD's. Despite living just outside NYC, getting in to the city is like the Bataan death march (up to 3 hours one way when the traffic is right). The Met's HD broadcasts are no solution either since movie theaters have lousy sound systems, designed for explosions, not choral music. You'd get better HiFi repro from a boom box.
So far I've been feeling my way through the recordings by asking friends, reading reviews on Amazon, looking at the big Classical CD guides. I think I may have something to offer you won't find elsewhere. I'm a straight shooter about what I do and don't like, and am (unlike "serious" reviewers) not intimidated by the industry. I don't even offer links to the Amazon site: I have nothing to gain (or lose) by these reviews. Also, I'm not a super-subtle connoisseur. All the renditions I mention here are done by excellent, professional musicians. There's not a musically terrible performance in the lot, regardless of my cavils and criticizing. I'm not offering ultra-fine discernings about which of two superb singers is finally just a bit better in this or that role I'm signaling the performances which are living, original, distinctive and memorable. I will prefer an eccentric performance that has power to an academically perfect one I struggle to keep my attention on. I'm including negative reviews as well as positive ones, despite karmic misgivings, because it's valuable info for the buyer, and helps understand what's really out there (even if you don't agree).
The DVD reviews focus more on the visual, since if you really want the music, you'll be playing this though a proper stereo on a CD, not letting a PS3 or the like funnel the sound through a home theater system. Good music does nothing to redeem a DVD if you have to shut your eyes to enjoy it. The DVDs are a particularly bad lot, since with these you have to contend not only with stupid staging and euro-trash updatings, but inept filming. Opera singers usually can't act, and they usually aren't attractive. No one asks that they be. You see them as tiny figures across a great hall. But stupid filmers arrogantly override the staging and treat us to close-ups we never needed to see. In the following reviews I will say some fairly catty things about various performers. I'm not really attacking them, but how they are made to appear.
I grade the DVDs and CDs on the basis of how well they are done, not on the quality of the music itself. A high grade is not in itself a recommendation, since some things, like early Mozart operas, are a waste of time no matter what energy is brought to bear to liven them up. I am sorry that I cannot give the original release date for each recording: the liner notes are not usually very clear or forthcoming on this head.
The arrangement of this page is chronological for composers and the works, then best to worst.
This Page begun in March of 2011
Claudio Monteverdi
1567-1643
Monteverdi is among the founders of western opera, and the only one its earliest composers whose works are still performed. Of his eighteen operatic works, only three survive, but these are in many ways unsurpassed by anything that followed. Surviving in an troubled manuscript tradition, with those manuscripts inconsistently and inadequately detailed, performance of Monteverdi required remarkable powers of historical reconstruction and musical imagination. The "right" way to perform him is now more a matter of taste than of truth.
recordings of Monteverdi's works
Jean-Baptiste Lully
1632-1687
An Italian dancer and guitar player, in his teens he moved to France where he social-climbed his way to the post of Court composer to Louis XIV, exercising finally total control and censorship of all music publicly performed in France, and made sure no one else was played. This was vicious tyranny that would not be seen again in the world of music till Wagner. This mean fellow was also a very consummate libertine, unable to restrain himself from either sex — a broadness of taste which had served him well on his way to the top. He died of gangrene after accidentally wounding his toe with his conductor's stave: a fitting end for a true monster of music. His works became politically unperformable during the revolution, and thereafter were made aesthetically anathema by the rise of Romanticism. Lully would only be rediscovered in the 1970's, as part of the early music revival. They are refined, perhaps even a decadent taste, requiring a sense of history, and a jaded musical palate.
The age of Louis XIV was
in some senses a nadir of French art: painting was never worse. The official
program of non-stop splendor produced the vulgar enormity of Versailles, and a
torrent of shallow frigid bombast in all the arts. Lully, is in some ways no exception. No case can be made that his works are
towering masterpieces. They are, rather, decorative art, but that of the highest
order. A sort of highbrow kitsch. As such they are very enjoyable in the post
modern age, when we believe in nothing and appreciate everything.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Lully is his control. Every act of his operas has a precise balance of components, unfailingly offered and beautifully realized. Lully's specialties are tender and affecting passages of erotic disquiet, and a choral-costume-dance spectaculars. Court music from the age of fêtes galantes, Lully's work is comparable to the painting of Watteau, or even the Tale of Genji.
various other opera reviews, not systematic or complete, in