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Opera Rara Records
Opera Rara is a London-based opera company and recording label which specialises in recording and performing forgotten operatic repertoire from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Founded in 1970 by bel canto enthusiasts Patric Schmid and Don White, Opera Rara's recordings are internationally distributed by Warner Classics. In September 2019, Italian conductor Carlo Rizzi succeeded Sir Mark Elder as Artistic Director. History Opera Rara launched in the 1970s with a series of concerts of 19th-century operatic arias performed at the Southbank Centre, St John’s Smith Square and Wigmore Hall in London. The company presented its first complete opera - Meyerbeer’s '' Il crociato in Egitto'' - in 1972 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, marking the first performance of the opera for more than 100 years. It subsequently performed at the Bath Festival, Camden Festival (where its first staged production was Donizetti’s ''Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali'') and Sadler’s Wells. A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bel Canto
Bel canto (Italian for "beautiful singing" or "beautiful song", )—with several similar constructions (''bellezze del canto'', ''bell'arte del canto'')—is a term with several meanings that relate to Italian singing. The phrase was not associated with a "school" of singing until the middle of the 19th century, when writers in the early 1860s used it nostalgically to describe a manner of singing that had begun to wane around 1830. Nonetheless, "neither musical nor general dictionaries saw fit to attempt definition f bel cantountil after 1900". The term remains vague and ambiguous in the 21st century and is often used to evoke a lost singing tradition. History of the term and its various definitions As generally understood today, the term ''bel canto'' refers to the Italian-originated vocal style that prevailed throughout most of Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Late 19th- and 20th-century sources "would lead us to believe that ''bel canto'' was restricted to b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Janet Price
Janet Price (born 1938) is a Welsh soprano particularly associated with the 19th-century Italian bel canto repertory. She has been married to composer Adrian Beaumont since 1963. Born in Pontypool, Wales, she studied piano and singing at the Cardiff University with Olive Groves, Isobel Baillie and Hervey Alan. She also studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. She made her debut in 1964 with the BBC Wales. In 1971, she appeared at the London Town Hall in a concert performance of Joseph Haydn's '' La fedeltà premiata''. She then specialized in 19th-century Italian bel canto and French repertoire and began an association with Opera Rara, appearing in concert and staged performances of long neglected works by composers such as Meyerbeer, Saverio Mercadante, Donizetti, Auber, etc. She also appeared with the Handel Opera Society, the Welsh National Opera, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Kent Opera. She sang Fiordiligi in '' Così fan tutte'' at the Opéra-Comique in 1974, and als ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ambroise Thomas
Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas (; 5 August 1811 – 12 February 1896) was a French composer and teacher, best known for his operas ''Mignon'' (1866) and ''Hamlet'' (1868). Born into a musical family, Thomas was a student at the Conservatoire de Paris, winning France's top music prize, the Prix de Rome. He pursued a career as a composer of operas, completing his first opera, ''La double échelle'', in 1837. He wrote twenty further operas over the next decades, mostly comic, but he also treated more serious subjects, finding considerable success with audiences in France and abroad. Thomas was appointed as a professor at the Conservatoire in 1856, and in 1871 he succeeded Daniel Auber as director. Between then and his death at his home in Paris twenty-five years later, he modernised the Conservatoire's organisation while imposing a rigidly conservative curriculum, hostile to modern music, and attempting to prevent composers such as César Franck and Gabriel Fauré from influencing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gioachino Rossini
Gioachino Antonio Rossini (29 February 1792 – 13 November 1868) was an Italian composer who gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano pieces, and some sacred music. He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring from large-scale composition while still in his thirties, at the height of his popularity. Born in Pesaro to parents who were both musicians (his father a trumpeter, his mother a singer), Rossini began to compose by the age of 12 and was educated at music school in Bologna. His first opera was performed in Venice in 1810 when he was 18 years old. In 1815 he was engaged to write operas and manage theatres in Naples. In the period 1810–1823 he wrote 34 operas for the Italian stage that were performed in Venice, Milan, Ferrara, Naples and elsewhere; this productivity necessitated an almost formulaic approach for some components (such as overtures) and a certain amount of self-borrowing. During ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Giovanni Pacini
Giovanni Pacini (11 February 17966 December 1867) was an Italian composer, best known for his operas. Pacini was born in Catania, Sicily, the son of the buffo Luigi Pacini, who was to appear in the premieres of many of Giovanni's operas. The family was of Tuscan origin, living in Catania when the composer was born. His first 25 or so operas were written when Gioachino Rossini dominated the Italian operatic stage. But Pacini's operas were "rather superficial", a fact which, later, he candidly admitted in his ''Memoirs''.Rose 2001, in Holden, p. 650 For some years he held the post of "director of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples." Later, retiring to Viareggio to found a school of music, Pacini took time to assess the state of opera in Italy and, during a five-year period during which he stopped composing, laid out his ideas in his Memoirs. Like Saverio Mercadante, who also reassessed the strength and weaknesses of this period in opera, Pacini's style did change, but he quickly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
