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2022-08-18 06:55:16
Jacques Offenbach: La Vie Parisienne Overture Context Jacques Offenbach’s famous comic operetta La Vie Parisienne was premiered initially as a five-act production at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in October 1866. Soon after Offenbach revised the operetta into the four-act version we now know (the original fourth movement was removed).The revised […] The post appeared first on Classicalexburns.
2021-11-17 10:05:29
Palazzetto Bru Zane's new edition of Offenbach's La Vie parisienne enables us to discover the composer's original intentions for the first time
Offenbach: La Vie parisienne (Photo Vincent Pontet) When Offenbach's La Vie parisienne premiered in 1866 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris, librettist Ludovic Halévy would write "The rehearsals of La Vie parisienne are driving me almost insane". This extremely fraught rehearsal period led to significant changes to the planned opera with much material being jettisoned. Now Offenbach's rehearsal periods were always extremely dynamic, he tended two write too much material and then shape/cut it accordingly. But in this case material was dropped because the cast were better actors than singers. Against all the odds, the result was a success and people rather forgot that La Vie parisienne was intended to be a larger-scale work. Luckily, the survival of a group of rare sources has enabled the reconstruction of Offenbach's putative original version, and this includes 16 numbers which are either new or in a modified version. We now have a full five-act […]
2021-07-15 06:41:48
Enjoyable, rare and marvellous: Lully's 'Ballet royal de la Naissance de Vénus' from Les Talens Lyriques
Lully Ballet royal de la Naissance de Venus; Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset; Aparte Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 13 July 2021 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★) A chance to hear some marvellous music from Lully's prime, showing that his court ballets aren't just dummy runs for his later operasWhilst Jean-Baptiste Lully's name is forever associated with the development of French opera as tragédie lyrique from the 1670s, prior to this the composer cut his teeth writing ballets. He wrote around 25 such ballets for the French royal court, from 1654 to 1685, as well as developing the comédie-ballet with the playwright Molière. This is music which we often hear in extracted form, and there don't seem to be many of Lully's complete ballets on disc. But a new recording from Christophe Rousset and Les talens lyriques on the Aparté label enables us to hear Lully's complete […]
2021-01-25 09:04:42
Rinaldo and Armida: from Monteverdi to Rossini to Dvorak to Judith Weir, composers have been inspired by Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata
Lully's Armide at the Palais-Royal Opera House in Paris in 1761, watercolour by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin In 1627, Claudio Monteverdi was busy at work on a new small-scale dramatic work for the wedding celebrations of Duke Odoardo Farnese of Parma and Margherita de' Medici. Armida Abbandonata was to be a work akin to Monteverdi's Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, with the story coming from the same source, Torquato Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata. In the event, the performance did not take place, and scholars are divided as to whether Monteverdi's Armida Abandonata was ever performed, whilst no trace of the music survives.The story of Armida and Rinaldo, however, would continue into operatic history and composers through to Rossini (in 1817), Dvorak (in 1904) and Judith Weir (in 2005) would be inspired by the same subject. What is fascinating about the list of operas based on the story of […]
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