Opera Sets

This was the most ambitious project on which Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal collaborated. It's both fairy tale and allegory with a score that's Wagnerian in its scale and breadth.... — Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010More…

Renée Fleming's tender and heartwarming account of Rusalka's Invocation to the Moon reflects the fact that the role of the lovelorn water nymph, taken by her in a highly successful production... — Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010More…

most familiar and unfamiliar opera: familiar because, as his lavish first stage work for London, it has been much written about both by modern historians and by the composer's contemporaries;... — Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010More…

This is a wonderfully refreshing set. The story emerges crystal-clear, even the black ending to the Giulietta scene in Venice, which in Bonynge's text restores the original idea of the heroine... — Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010More…

Pavarotti's Rodolfo is perhaps the best thing he has ever done: not only the finest recorded account of the role since Björling's on the Beecham set, but adding the honeyed Italianate warmth... — Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010More…

[Van Dam] fulfils expectations with a reading that is finely moulded from start to finish...Heppner seems to have benefited from his longer experience of his role...Throughout this is a portrayal... — Gramophone Magazine, March 1997More…

Kiri te Kanawa sings the Countess's aria with meltingly beautiful tone...The discreet flirtation with Cherubino...is done with some feeling...Thomas Allen is quite simply superb as the Count. — Gramophone Magazine, Awards Issue 2011More…

From the House of the Dead (the 1980 Gramophone Record of the Year) was here recorded for the first time in its proper, original version; and this revealed it as even more of a masterpiece... — Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010More…

Wagner-wise this is new Solti, a more contemplatively mellow interpreter, returning to a score that he hadn't led since earlier days in German repertoire houses...Norman had worked hard, and... — Gramophone Magazine, July 2010More…

Chailly has recorded the work before, but in the years since he's matured as a Rossini conductor, and the Scala orchestra has this music under its fingers; there's an energy and vitality to... — Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010More…