Of all the Strauss-Hoffmansthal collaborations, Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) is by far the most ambitious, and perhaps the opera with the richest musical ideas. Dealing with ...więcej »
Another outstanding recording from the golden era at EMI. Made in 1952, and produced by Walter Legge, it was the first of two that featured Boris Christoff in the title role. The second version, th...więcej »
The music of Alexander Aronovich Knajfel was considered too advanced for Soviet Russia in the 1960s, and he was blacklisted from the Union of Soviet Composers in 1979 for having participated in fes...więcej »
"Multiform and yet organically homogeneous, modern and yet timeless, comical and yet deeply moving, Nikolai Karetnikov's Till Eulenspiegel is certainly an opera unlike any other in contemporar...więcej »
Russian composer Grigory Fried was born in 1915 into a family of Jewish intellectuals. In WWII he served at the Western front in a folk ensemble, and experienced the horrors of war, the bodily and ...więcej »
Franz Schubert was a prolific composer, perhaps best known for his symphonies and chamber music, but he also turned his hand to Romantic opera. Despite having no experience of seeing his theatrical...więcej »
Christoph Willibald Gluck is one of the great reformers of opera, departing from the tried and tested genres of opera seria in the 18th century: Metastasio's drama per musica and Rameau's trag&eacu...więcej »
Fantasy comic opera in three acts, Text after Shakespeare by Hermann S. MosenthalCD11 Overture 8'31Act 12 Dialogue: Unsere Geschichte (narrator) 0'353 No.1: Nein...więcej »
Best known for his final opera, The Stone Guest, Alexander Dargomyzhsky was a 19th-century composer who effectively bridged the gap in Russian national opera between Mikhail Glinka and the later ge...więcej »
"For me there could have been no better subject, no better poetic model, than Snegurochka, the shepherd Lel and Lovely Spring: for me there could be nothing more beautiful than the realm of th...więcej »
Marking the end of Mozart's early operas, Idomeneo is commonly regarded as the composer's greatest serious opera and his first operatic masterpiece, containing many allusions to the style of the Fr...więcej »
Bellini’s Il pirata became an international must-see in mid-18th-century Europe. His third opera, the work was written for La Scala in Milan and brought Bellini to the attention of the musica...więcej »
The history of Wozzeck began nearly 200 years ago, when Johann Christian Woyzeck, a onetime soldier and jobless wigmaker, killed his sweetheart with a knife in a fit of jealous rage. The tragic inc...więcej »
Known for its fair which was held five times a year under the Russian Empire, the small village of Velyki Sorochintsi – located in Central Ukraine, south east of Kiev – was made famous ...więcej »
Though its popularity has sadly diminished over the years, up to about the middle of the last century Martha was one of the most frequently performed operas on the German stage -- largely owing to ...więcej »
Friedenstag is at once Richard Strauss (1864-1949) last operatic collaboration with his librettist Stefan Zweig and his first with Joseph Gregor. The themes of the opera – set in the mid 17th...więcej »
The composition of Alexander Borodin's opera Prince Igor -- based on the Song of Igor, a 12th-century Russian epic -- got off to a slow start, with the composer's career as an organic chemist preve...więcej »