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 […]

Opera-Comique in three acts (here performed in English but originally in French). Running Time: 2 hours. OperaScribe reviewed this opera in June and I ended up enjoying it so much that I decided to review it myself (he has also been complaining that I don’t do any 18th century operas). Do not expect the raunchiness […]

Opera in tre atti. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes (with four minute appendix). Auguste Rodin: The Burghers of Calais.  This is Donizetti’s anti-female opera, the apogee of the composer’s desire to distance himself completely from the then current convention of prima donna supremacy in Italian opera. The work does call for three female voices […]

Opera in tre atti. Running Time: 2 hours. Just an FYI for those of you paying attention before the review: I successfully defended my MA thesis in history a little over a week ago and will be graduating in November. Thank you. This opera was written, not surprisingly, as a vehicle for soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, […]

Opera in two acts. Running Time: 1 hour 55 minutes. I finished this one in January and kept it back because I really wasn’t sure what to do with it. Then I found that Moniuszko also wrote an opera based on the same play and I figured I would match them up as frames for […]

Opera in three acts. Running Time: 1 hour 4 minutes. Written in 1887 to a libretto by Julius Zeyer with whom Janacek had not attained permission, and then send to Dvorak (whom Zeyer wanted to set his verses), this first attempt by Janacek to compose an opera had to wait until 1925 to be performed. […]