The world was due for a major new recording of Wagner's Parsifal, with some years having elapsed since the monster, four-hour work had seen a fresh one. There are a number of attractions to this one, recorded live at the Vienna State Opera in 2021. First is the production, designed and directed from house arrest in Russia by Kirill Serebrennikov. The version was controversial at the time, and subsequent events have made it timely. Serebrennikov transplants the tale to a modern prison, with characters in tracksuits and the like; the complex witch Kundry is (believe it or not) a photojournalist. None of this affects the singing, which is done straight, but the release graphics give one an idea. The major draw for many listeners, and probably the one that put the album on classical best-seller charts in early 2024, will be the presence of star tenor Jonas Kaufmann, in fine form in the title role (and album listeners get to avoid the flashback staging designed to circumvent that fact that the 50-something Kaufmann was playing a young man). The instrumental work from the Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper is very strong. However, what really puts this performance in the history books is the performance of mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca as Kundry. This was apparently her first appearance in a Wagner opera, but in the top-volume material in Act III, she is fully Kaufmann's equal. Some may find that she carries the whole production, with a rising line of intensity running through the whole giant structure. In any event, even listeners who own the Parsifal of Herbert von Karajan or one of the other classic readings will want to check this recording out.© James Manheim /TiVo

Taken from several live performances at the Gasteig in Munich in early 2023, this recording of Wagner's Siegfried made classical best-seller charts later that year. It is part of a series that began in 2016, intending to record the entire Ring Cycle live. The recordings have all been successful, and this is testimony to the skills of conductor Simon Rattle. There are conductors' Wagner performances, and there are singers' Wagner performances. This is the former. The Bavarian Radio Symphony seizes the listener's attention from the opening bell, and the energy never flags. There is nothing objectionable about the singers, but few of them will stick in one's head. The exception, perhaps, is soprano Anja Kampe as Brunnhilde (and Danae Kontora as the Voice of the Forest Bird); Kampe, of course, doesn't enter until the end, but at that point, everything comes together for a really thrilling conclusion of "radiant love, laughing death." Although these were live performances, they might just as well have been made in a studio; Bavarian Radio's engineering in its hometown is superbly detailed, and the audience discipline is awesome (no applause or other crowd noise of any kind is retained). There is a liveliness to Rattle's Wagner that sets it apart from performances in the German tradition, and it is fully on display in this recording.© James Manheim /TiVo

Beyond the neglect of French Baroque music in general, it is a bit hard to understand why composer Pancrace Royer was almost completely unknown until Christophe Rousset came along to champion him, first in harpsichord music and now, with these suites of music drawn from operas, in orchestral music. In the 18th century, Royer was quite well known and admired among others by Rameau, whose music he helped along considerably. Royer certainly inhabited Rameau's stylistic world, but from the evidence here, his music is distinctive and merits the adjective "surprising" that Rousset has attached to it. It is colorful, given to unexpected turns of harmony, and vivid in its evocation of the exotic scenes of French opera. Sample the "Air pour les turcs" ("Air for the Turks") from Zaïde, reine de Grenade, with its crackling percussion. Royer challenged his orchestra with virtuoso ensemble writing in the likes of the "Premier et second tambourins" from Almasis, and Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques step up with precise, vigorous readings that one imagines would have made the composer overjoyed. The inclusion of two alternate versions for movements from Zaïde is also unusual and gives insight into the compositional thinking of the day. Essential for specialists and enthusiasts interested in the French Baroque, this album is a lot of fun for anyone, with only overdone church sound detracting from the overall effect. © James Manheim /TiVo

Ever since Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus and the subsequent film by Milos Forman, the operas of Mozart's rival Antonio Salieri have enjoyed a revival: historians determined that not only did Salieri not poison Mozart, he admired him, and Mozart at least respected the older Italian. Indeed, Les Horaces (1786) represents several accomplishments that were not on Mozart's résumé: it is a full-scale French opera, and its recitatives are orchestrally accompanied and contribute elegantly to the action. Berlioz, always an astute critic, numbered himself among the admirers of Salieri's French operas of the 1780s; this one was not as successful as the others, but that could have been due to any number of factors. The plot deals with a woman, Camille, whose romantic life is caught between factions in a war in early Roman times, and Rousset's live reading here benefits from a strong soprano lead, Dutch singer and French Baroque specialist Judith van Wanroij. Other singers likewise step up, but the real credit goes to Rousset, who gets the strengths of Salieri's score: the grand intermèdes, and the exciting finale of Act 1, where the joining-together of action and music is in Mozart's league even if the tunes are not. Also praiseworthy is the engineering work of the curiously named Little Tribeca team, who obtain the best possible sound from none other than Versailles. Highly recommended to those who have dismissed Salieri: this is a sympathetic and enthusiastic performance of his music. © TiVo

2020 and 2021 were not very conducive to live recordings. So, with Elīna Garanča, you’ll be all the more delighted to be able to discover these superb recordings taken from the last two editions of the Salzburg festival. With the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and under the baton of Christian Thielemann, the soprano presents the magnificent orchestral lieder from Wagner’s Wesendonck cycle as well as Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder.In concert, the two works are often performed together because they follow two similar themes: intimacy and introspection. When Wagner composed his Wesendonck-Lieder for piano and female voice in 1857-1858, his world revolved around one person: Mathilde Wesendonck. This nostalgic love, which never really manifested itself, was recorded by Wagner in five lieder based on Mathilde’s own poems. Although Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder aren’t centred around a particular person or event – rather, they are five independent works based on Friedrich Rückert texts – the compositions are nevertheless deeply emotional and place personal experience at the forefront.Elīna Garanča gets to the heart of this intimacy and introspection, helped by the orchestra, which rolls out a carpet of sound which is full of emotion. It’s not only the pieces themselves, but also the concert’s circumstances that give this live recording a special appeal. Garanča is at one with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with vibrancy, finesse and impressive skill, without being drowned out by the instrumental mass. A real record/event. © Lena Germann/Qobuz

Everyone knows Camille Saint-Saëns has a great sense of humour thanks to his Carnaval des Animaux in which no one escapes ridicule, not even him. Now the Palazzetto Bru Zane Foundation and Hervé Niquet have unearthed Phryné, a forgotten comic opera from 1893 enriched with recitatives composed by André Messager three years later.Received with immense and lasting success in its time, this brilliant work eventually fell into the abyss, never to be seen again. Fortunately, fans of Saint-Saëns made great efforts to rediscover his works on the centenary of his death in 2021. Phryné captures the "Grecomania" that was prevalent in all the arts in France at this time, especially in Offenbach’s music and even in architecture (just think of the beautiful Parisian district of New Athens in the 9th arrondissement). Ironically, and perhaps a little cheekily, Saint-Saens confessed that he was “working on this little piece with infinite pleasure” and was infatuated with this courtesan musician who had served as a model for the sculptor Praxitele.Always keen to discover a forgotten repertoire, Hervé Niquet brought together a few singers, Florie Valiquette, Cyrille Dubois, Anaïs Constans and Thomas Dolié, to breathe some life back into Phryné with his Concert Spirituel, with the aim of producing a concert version to be performed in the Opéra de Rouen Normandie in 2021. Though Lucien Augé’s libretto may seem tasteless today with its hefty dose of misogyny, Saint-Saens’ music is simply delicious, with a succession of arias and ensembles. This modest and charming opera-comedy, which Charles Gounod so enjoyed, offers a less serious and less academic take of a composer that well and truly deserves to be rediscovered. © François Hudry/Qobuz

The gestation of this project lasted two years. Anna Prohaska and Julius Drake finally concentrated their research on the themes of Eve, Paradise and banishment. Some songs were obvious choices, such as Fauré’s Paradis, in which God appears to Eve and asks her to name each flower and animal, or Purcell’s Sleep, Adam, sleep with its references to Genesis. But Anna Prohaska also wished to illustrate the cliché of the woman who brought original sin into the world and her status as a tempter who leads man astray, as in Brahms’s Salamander, Wolf’s Die Bekehrte or Ravel’s Air du Feu. In Das Paradies und die Peri, Schumann conjures up the image of Syria’s rose-covered plains. Bernstein also transports us to the desert with Silhouette.. John Milton’s seventeenth-century masterpiece Paradise Lost was the inspiration for Charles Ives and Benjamin Britten, also featured in this very rich programme that constitutes an invitation to travel and reflection. © Alpha Classics

2020 and 2021 were not very conducive to live recordings. So, with Elīna Garanča, you’ll be all the more delighted to be able to discover these superb recordings taken from the last two editions of the Salzburg festival. With the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and under the baton of Christian Thielemann, the soprano presents the magnificent orchestral lieder from Wagner’s Wesendonck cycle as well as Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder.In concert, the two works are often performed together because they follow two similar themes: intimacy and introspection. When Wagner composed his Wesendonck-Lieder for piano and female voice in 1857-1858, his world revolved around one person: Mathilde Wesendonck. This nostalgic love, which never really manifested itself, was recorded by Wagner in five lieder based on Mathilde’s own poems. Although Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder aren’t centred around a particular person or event – rather, they are five independent works based on Friedrich Rückert texts – the compositions are nevertheless deeply emotional and place personal experience at the forefront.Elīna Garanča gets to the heart of this intimacy and introspection, helped by the orchestra, which rolls out a carpet of sound which is full of emotion. It’s not only the pieces themselves, but also the concert’s circumstances that give this live recording a special appeal. Garanča is at one with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with vibrancy, finesse and impressive skill, without being drowned out by the instrumental mass. A real record/event. © Lena Germann/Qobuz

While Mozart was largely overlooked in the French capital, Antonio Salieri took on the reigns of the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris Opera), a fruitful collaboration that was completely broken up by the French Revolution. After the success of his work Les Danaïdes, composed for Paris in 1784, Salieri worked tirelessly with Beaumarchais, spurred on by the success and scandal of his Figaro, on a new project which would become Tarare. Beaumarchais moved himself shamelessly toward stardom, skillfully self-promoting and attending rehearsals so as to assure that the orchestra played pianissimo to emphasize the primacy of his verse during performances. Beaumarchais found that the music was too overwhelming to “embellish the lyrics”.Created one year after Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (which was relatively well-received in Vienna before triumphing in Prague), Tarare was an immense success in Paris maintaining the status of the composer’s repertoire despite the political turmoil of the time before disappearing from view around 1826, thereon ceasing to be played. Beaumarchais’ words were immediately adapted into Italian by Lorenzo Da Ponte to be performed and met with equal success in Vienna. Tarare is half lyrical tragedy, half comic opera with a hint of orientalism.After resuscitating Les Danaïdes and Les Horaces, Christophe Rousset finished off his series of recordings dedicated to Salieri’s French operas for the Parisian public. Tarare is very much of its time, that of the Lumières, and used the power of art to challenge despotism in all its forms. Thanks to Christophe Rousset’s excellent delivery and lively direction, this recording enables one to judge the merits of the composition and the chasm that separates an honest and talented musician from a solitary and impassioned one like Mozart. © François Hudry/Qobuz

The musical world owes a debt of gratitude to French conductor Christophe Rousset not only for the vital, exquisite performances he delivers with the ensembles Les Talens Lyriques and Choeur de Chambre de Namur, but for his work in bringing to light neglected masterpieces of Baroque opera. Lully's Bellérophon, premiered in 1679, was a huge success in its time, with an initial run of nine months. Part of its popularity was doubtless due to the parallels that could be drawn between its plot and certain recent exploits of Louis XV, but even the earliest critics recognized the score's uniqueness and exceptional quality within Lully's oeuvre, so it's perhaps surprising that it has never been recorded before. The distinctiveness of the music was likely a result at least in part of the fact that Lully's preferred librettist Philippe Quinault was out of favor at the court of Louis XV at the time, so the composer turned to Thomas Corneille for the libretto, and Corneille's literary and dramatic styles were so different from Quinault's that Lully was nudged out of his comfort zone and had to develop new solutions to questions of structure and the marrying of music to text. It is the first opera for which Lully composed fully accompanied recitatives, and that alone gives it a textural richness that surpasses his earlier works. The composer also allows soloists to sing together, something that was still a rarity in Baroque opera. There are several duets and larger ensembles; the love duet, "Que tout parle à l'envie de notre amour extreme!," is a ravishing expression of passion and happiness, as rhapsodic as anything in 19th century Italian opera. The level of musical inventiveness throughout is exceptional even for Lully; the expressiveness of the recitatives, the charm of the instrumental interludes, the originality of the choruses, and the limpid loveliness of the airs make this an opera that demands attention. Rousset and his forces give an outstanding performance that's exuberantly spirited, musically polished, rhythmically springy, and charged with dramatic urgency. The soloists are consistently of the highest order. Cyril Auvity brings a large, virile, passionate tenor to the title role and Céline Scheen is warmly lyrical as his lover Philonoë. Ingrid Perruche is fiercely powerful as the villain, Stéenobée, and Jean Teitgen is a secure, authoritative Apollo. Soloists, chorus, and orchestra are fluent in the subtle inflections of French middle Baroque ornamentation. The sound of the live recording is very fine, with a clean, immediate, realistic ambience. This is a release that fans of Baroque opera will not want to miss. Highly recommended. © TiVo

The production of Wagner's overgrown Grail tale Parsifal from the shrine at Bayreuth, directed by the composer's grandson Wieland and first staged in 1951, was famously spare in its design; the conductor, Hans Knappertsbusch ("Kna," to perfect Wagnerites), thought the sets were still to be constructed and was chagrined to find that there really were very few. Vocally, however, the music was luxuriant. By the time of this 1955 live recording, most of the singers, including Martha Mödl as Kundry, were veterans of the production, and there was a strong newcomer, baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Amfortas, already with his characteristic honeyed tone. The production was recorded in the studio in 1951, with somewhat better sound than on this release, but really, the live sound is impressive for 1955 (some of the credit should go to Hänssler Classic's remastering), and text intelligibility is great. Further, Knappertsbusch is known to have preferred live performance to recording, and the production benefits from a good deal of forward motion; sample around and compare timings with other recordings, for almost everywhere, Knappertsbusch comes in faster than average. Yet the music never feels rushed in any way. Of course, several generations of Wagner singers have come and gone since this recording was made, but for those wanting to experience Wagner "from the source," this may be a prime choice despite its age. © James Manheim /TiVo

The recordings here by Martha Mödl from 1955 document not only her impeccable rendering of the German, but also her singular singing status. She started out as a mezzo-soprano, but in 1949, with her first Kundry, she switched to the vocal range midway between mezzo and dramatic soprano, and in March 1952 she sang her first Brünnhilde. She was there from the very start in Neubayreuth: From 1951 to 1955, Mödl sang Kundry in all of the Parsifal performances and only began alternating with Astrid Varnay from 1956. She was also cast in the Ring from 1951, first as Gutrune and the Third Norn, and from 1953 also as Brünnhilde and in 1954 as Sieglinde as well. There, too, she alternated with Varnay, who had been performing almost without pause as Brünnhilde since 1951. Mödl sang Isolde in 1952 and 1953. To the director Wieland Wagner she was a “high dramatic soprano free of pathos”. He valued the way her “voice, personality and performance formed an absolutely inseparable whole”. Her stage presence can no longer be experienced through the recordings, but the vocal penetration of the roles can be. © Profil