Purcell: "The Fairy Queen"
Concentus Musicus Wien/Arnold Schoenberg
Choir/Bonney/McNair/Chance:
Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Teldec Das Alte Werk, 4509-97664-2
(2 CDs, 120 mins)
Dial-a-track code: 1641
Purcell operas are a bit like American football matches: lots of starting and stopping and cheerleading and people parading about waving flags. At least, they were until Nikolaus Harnoncourt took at them. "Less of the hey nonny no and more of the driving bass," said he - and lo, 300 years after an untimely death in 1695, Purcell became a trendy young thing and a bestseller to boot. This is a set of unearthly beauty. As usual with Harnoncourt, it's a wonderful team effort complete with immaculate cast, crisp orchestra, fab choir, etc, etc: what lifts it out of the ordinary, though, is the spectacular presence of the sopranos Barbara Bonney - and Sylvia McNair. Oh, and that divinely digital sound quality.
Bryn Terfel: "Impressions"
Deutsche Grammophon, 449 190-2 (66 mins)
Dial-a-track code: 1751
We are in the age of the fine young baritone, folks, and here's a particularly likeable specimen. Terfel is a chunky Welsh lad with a chunky, cable knit voice which can switch in a second from the irony of a Mozart comedy to the outbursts of early Wagner, from the insouciance of Schubert's The Trout to the angst of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, and manages to sound equally at home in all. A much more substantial selection than its daffy title would suggest, and heartily recommended.
Galina Gorchakova: "Verdi and Tchaikovsky arias"
Philips, 446 405-2 (60 mins) Dial a track code: 1861
Apart from being drop dead gorgeous and a superb actress, Galina Gorchakova has one of the creamiest soprano voices to have emerged in a recent times. On this disc she portrays, with assured grace and unfailingly lovely tone, a number of youthful heroines who find themselves, for one reason or another - usually, needless to say, love or the lack of it - overtaken by despair. Her Verdi, in particular, is a thing of wonder, for there is no screaming at all, no harshness in the higher register: listen as she drops the notes of the introduction to the Willow Song from Otello like individual teardrops into a well of sadness. The Tchaikovsky excerpts, though they are lamentably few, make an absorbing counterpoint.
Handel: "Tamerlano"
English Baroque Soloists/Argenta/Robson/Ragin/
Chance: John Eliot Gardiner
Erato, 2292-45498-2 (3 CDs, 193 mins)
Dial-a-track code: 1971
Tamerlano is unusual among Handel's operas for its dramatic Intensity, much of which is conveyed in long, accompanied recitatives, and in the importance it accords to the role of the tenor who, as the defeated Ottoman sultan Bajazet, pushes not one but two castrati out of the limelight until he dies - reluctantly - near the end of Act Three. It's spiky, highly charged music which is given a spiky, urgent, reading in John Eliot Gardiner's live recording based on a performance at the 1985 Gottingen festival. Not as smoothly sophisticated as the newer Handel recordings, perhaps, but there's lots to enjoy in the silvery Asteria of Nancy Argenta, a plucky Michael Chance in the fiendishly difficult role of Andronicus, the ever stylish Derek Lee Ragin as the Uzbek usurper - and an uncompromisingly tough tenor in the shape of Nigel Robson as Bajazet.
Cecilia Bartoli: "A Portrait" Decca, 448 300-2 (79 mins) Dial-a-track code: 2081
The bad news: there's nothing new here. The good news, it's a "best of" compilation. And when the best is this brilliant, who's complaining?
