Boito reviews

Boito reviews

Duets by Bizet, Boito, Donizetti, Verdi, Gounod, Lara and F. Hermann

This is boys having fun. And the CD is at its best when the composer is having fun too. So Rolando Villazón and Ildar Abdrazakov make the most of Donizetti’s Act I duet from L’eslisir d’amore, with Villazón a plaintive love-sick Nemorino and Abdrazakov a snake-like Dulcamara.

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Cesare Siepi performs arias by Mozart, Verdi, Gomes, Meyerbeer, Halévy, Ponchielli & Boito

The greatest Italian basso cantante of the 1950s and 1960s here displays richly muscular tone and dramatic power to eclipse most modern rivals.

Michael Scott-Rohan

 

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Roland Schwab directs Boito's Mefistofele

Boito’s opera is not only one of the most ambitious produced by any 19th-century Italian composer, but also one of the most impressive attempts ever made to set Goethe’s Faust to music. Yet with its vast scope and range it’s inevitably somewhat diffuse, and certainly a tough nut to crack in the theatre on those rare occasions when a company is prepared to commit to the substantial project of staging it.

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Cheryl Barker: Arias by Cilea, Tchaikovsky, Leoncavallo, Boito, Jake Heggie, Strauss, Malcolm Williamson & Catalani

Any criticisms in what follows should be prefaced by awed admiration for Cheryl Barker’s achievements as a fine singing actress. Her portrayal of Puccini’s Suor Angelica included a Callas moment of naked anguish and her Salome was the most powerful I’ve seen since Hildegard Behrens.
 
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Beethoven, Boito and Wagner: Film documentaries

Beethoven and Wagner make natural bedfellows in this pair of instalments from the BBC's Great Composers series, produced in 1997. Both documentaries touch on the composers' deviant personal characters — resulting respectively from Beethoven's tragic deafness, his struggle against fate; and from Wagner's anti-Semitism and obsession with artistic grandeur.

 

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Wagner, Mozart, Gounod, Verdi, Boito, Mascagni etc

With her versatility and technique, De los Angeles was one of the finest singers of her time. A wide-ranging selection of items recorded in her prime attests to her artistry.
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Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Gounod, Boito and Wagner

Zealand bass-baritone has already sung on stage five of the roles sampled here, including Papageno at Glyndebourne, which registers as the most thoroughly thought out. In some of the others there’s insufficient definition of character – Leporello, Basilio and Bartolo sound pretty much alike, and he’s a long way as yet from a full realisation of the rich possibilities of Falstaff or the Dutchman.
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Boito: Mefistofele

Boito’s ambitious operatic version of Goethe’s Faust turned the spotlight on to the protagonist’s demonic tempter and companion, providing basses possessing a penchant for devilry with a star part. Samuel Ramey has been Mephistopheles’s leading recent exponent, and in this 1989 San Francisco production grabs the attention from his first note and never relinquishes it. Vocally and dramatically, this is a top-quality portrayal.
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Bellini, Verdi, Mascagni, Giordano, Panizza, Meyerbeer, Boito & Ponchielli

Here is a disc that smacks of hubris. Having parted company with Warner, the aspiring supertenor has founded his own label, Cuibar (marketed under the Avie umbrella), and cast himself as soloist, conductor and producer of its debut recital issue.
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Boito: Mefistofele

The librettist of Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff, Arrigo Boito was also the composer of two operas, one of which, Mefistofele, based on Goethe’s Faust, he composed while still in his twenties. Its first performance at La Scala, in 1868, lasted five and a half hours, and was roundly booed. Shortened and revised seven years later, it was this time a success in Bologna, and is still to be met with in Italian opera houses and occasionally elsewhere.
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Boito: Mefistofele

Arrigo Boito’s only completed opera is arguably the most ambitious written by an Italian composer between William Tell (1829) and Verdi’s Otello (1887). Certainly, with its courageous assaults on some of Goethe’s most theatrically demanding scenes from Faust (Parts I and II) – the Prologue and Epilogue in Heaven, the Classical Walpurgisnacht – it aspires to, and occasionally matches, the visionary poetic ideals of the original poem. In a performance such as this – the finest, I contend, ever recorded – it seems a far finer work than its critics generally allow.
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Puccini, Catalani, Ponchielli, Cilea, Boito, Mascagni

Not surprisingly, none of these Italian opera arias is from the bel canto era, or even from Verdi. They are all verismo arias by Puccini and his contemporaries (and the somewhat earlier Ponchielli), to which Jane Eaglen’s huge soprano voice is eminently suited. Rich and opulent throughout all registers, and only occasionally losing quality at the very top of its range, it is for the most part heard at its best on this disc.
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Boito: Mefistofele

Boito’s epic is delivered with conviction in this 1985 performance, with Nicola Ghiuselev grand and unruly as the devil incarnate, Kaloudi Kaloudov providing a truly Italianate quality as Faust, and Stefka Evstatieva a comprehensive Margherita. Dynamic orchestral playing and conducting, but no libretto. George Hall
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