Melchior Cortez News
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2024-04-25
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2024-03-13 08:05:00
Little short of a revelation: Michael Spyres, Les Talens Lyriques & Christophe Rousset explore Wagner's influences with In the Shadows
[…] the more heroic aspect.. In fact, I have heard Spyres in this role, when the opera was performed in Paris at the Opera Comique back in 2012 [see my review] and for all the added weight on his voice some 12 years later, he still has the ability to thrill here.Spontini moved his sphere of operations to Berlin following failures in Paris after the Restoration, but it his Parisian operas, La Vestale (1807) and Fernand Cortez (1809) that were his most influential. Spontini's Agnes von Hohenstaufen (1829) was his only major German opera, and we hear Heinrich's 'Der Strom wälzt ruhig seine dunklen Wogen'. That this is the first recording of the aria in German says a lot for how much still needs doing in terms of restoring Spontini's output. Here, it is a novelty hearing the French style with the underlying Italian accents but with German language. Spyres makes […]
2022-05-10 06:53:37
Boulevard des Italiens: tenor Benjamin Bernheim explores Paris' long love-affair with French composers
[…] returned with the Bourbons, but was best known as a teacher and most of his operas date from his earlier period. We hear Licinius' Air 'Julia va mourir!' from La vestale, preceded by the instrumental Prelude and the recitative (throughout the recital, the approach to recitative is admirably full). Spontini's La vestale from 1807 played an important role in moving French opera from the 18th century tragedie lyrique to more 19th century forms (and his 1809 Fernand Cortez would play an equally important role, prefiguring as it does the historical grand opera of Auber and Meyerbeer). For La vestale we combine classicism (Spontini's music was much admired for this quality by Berlioz) with romantic passion. It is a balance difficult to get right. Bernheim makes the music dramatic and stylish, with a sense of sturm und drang alongside the classical style. We then return to Verdi, to Jerusalem his major French recasting of I Lombardi. […]
2021-08-02 07:33:33
Admired by Berlioz and Wagner, the operas of Gaspare Spontini were hugely influential in their day yet are still a rarity on the modern operatic stage
Soprano Caroline Branchu as Julia in Spontini's La Vestale Berlioz wrote in his memoirs, 'My religion is that of Beethoven, Weber, Gluck, Spontini', yet Berlioz' great admiration for Spontini's three major French operas, La Vestale, Fernand Cortez and Olimpie, has not translated into the modern era. In the post-War era of re-discovery of bel canto, Spontini's operas have tended to be revived as vehicles for great female singers and his finest opera, La Vestale, performed in Italian translation rather than French. But the composer seems to have attracted an element of ill luck during his lifetime as well, and you can't help feel sorry for him, for all that he was evidently not a likeable man (Berlioz wrote, after Spontini's death, in a letter of 1/2/1856, 'He was not a likeable man, but I had come to love him by dint of admiration. The very asperities of his temperament […]
2020-11-03 08:52:02
O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort: Music, neuroscience and fear of death in OAE's Bach, the Universe and Everything
[…] this series always follow an established pattern, so the chorale prelude led to a piece of unaccompanied polyphony, William Byrd's Beati mundo corde. A communion motet for All Saints from volume one of Byrd's Gradualia of 1605. Sung without a conductor by the eight voices of the vocal ensemble, this was quite a strong sound, with rather a sculptural feel to the slowly unfolding phrases. A reading from The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1941) by John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts talked about man having never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. The book is a description of a 1940 marine specimen-collecting boat expedition that Steinbeck made with his friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, and is Steinbeck's most important work of non-fiction. Bach's Cantata BWV 60 'O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort' was composed for the 24th Sunday after Trinity and was first performed by Bach in Leipzig […]
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