Opera in one act. Running Time: 1 hour 5 minutes. OperaScribe suggested this opera for comparison to Turandot. I will also be doing Iris by Mascagni soon for a comparison with Madama Butterfly. Leoni was a Milanese-born contemporary of Puccini so the comparisons are apt. Never as successful globally, he lived significantly longer, dying at age 84 in 1949 at Hampstead, […]
Opera in four acts. Running Time: 2 hours 18 minutes. As you all know, today is my 29th birthday and I always release a post on my birthday. I finished this one in April, although I had been working on it since January. Rimsky-Korsakov dedicated this score to Frederic Chopin and it possesses strong Polish […]
Opera semi-seria in three acts. Running Time: 2 hours 42 minutes. Opera likes to use mental illness as a theatrical element a lot. From mad scenes to mass-immolation, the genre has got it all. But rarely does opera present the probable mental illness of a real life historical figure as it does here, even though […]
Opera in tre atti. Running Time: 2 hours 6 minutes. This opera is a case of weird vocal casting. The lead is a baritone, which is fine, but the villainess (his wife) is a soprano, and the good girl (their daughter) is a mezzo-soprano. Their son (who was supposed to be dead) is a tenor […]
Opera in two acts. Running Time: 2 hours 47 minutes. The fifth of Rossini’s nine innovative scores for the San Carlo in Naples, Ricciardo e Zoraide (although perhaps the most darkly Teutonic and with very effective music, particularly for the tenors) has been critically considered to be the subjectively least interesting of the nine. Lord Byron claimed […]
Opera in four acts. Running Time: 2 hours 2 minutes. Portrait of Katerina Rosa Botzaris, daughter of Markos Botsaris, by Joseph Karl Stieler. Now, something different, a Greek opera! Actually this is a performance in Greek translation of an originally Italian-language opera by an Ionian composer which incorporates a hybrid (LOVE saying that word!) musical form: although […]
Opera semiseria in three acts. Running Time: 2 hours 56 minutes. I could not find the Opera Rara release anywhere (well, for free that is) so I selected this nearly 3 hour recording with the 1991 recording with the Orchestral of Eastern Netherlands conducted by Gabriele Bellini with Mariella Devia as Linda, Luca Canonici as […]
