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This was Joan Sutherland's second recording of Lucia, made with an all-star cast in prime vocal condition, and it is a must for those who believe that bel canto opera should live up to its descriptive title: "beautiful singing." In the 10 years since her first Lucia recording, she had settled more c...

A recording of Norma is essential for any Maria Callas collection. This intense and musically demanding drama deals with forbidden love, infidelity, conflicting emotions, and death that comes almost as a relief from overwrought passion. It gives Callas golden opportunities for characterization and d...

This opera becomes a battle of the divas in its great second act, with Sutherland, as Mary Stuart, pitted against the jealous, paranoid, and vengeful Elizabeth I (Tourangeau). There is an intensely dramatic confrontation in which insults are violently exchanged between the powerful monarch and her i...

This album is curiously packaged: the Latin title Credo on a recording of Russian liturgical music, sold not with religious symbolism but with a close-up of the heavy-lidded, dark eyes of Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Fortunately, the contents are eminently worthwhile. Hvorostovsky is, deservedly, one of the...

This most favorite of choral works is infused with life through the fluid singing of the soloists. Hagegard's everyman baritone overflows with sensitive phrasing and a deliciously appealing timbre. McNair's lovely lyric glides across the music, capturing the subtle textual nuances--she has never bee...

When Wagner set the Ring to music, he intended the orchestra to act in the fashion of a chorus from a classic Greek tragedy--setting the mood and commenting on the action. In order to allow a nonverbal musical line to reflect on the plot, Wagner developed a psychologically and musically complex symb...

Another Paris Tannhäuser recording, this one seeing the adaptable Placido Domingo take a break from the world of Italianate opera to try on the mantle of Heldentenor. Domingo's clear, manly voice is well suited to the transformation--precisely why Italians usually don't think of him as a bella ...

Sir George Solti's renditions of Wagner's operas often defined the standard interpretation practice in the post-World War II musical world, and he is at his best in this late 1980s digitally mastered recording partnered with his long-time collaborators, the Vienna Philharmonic--perhaps the most emot...

This is widely regarded as the best stereophonic Pagliacci--and many would say the best, period. Its virtues are primarily musical: Carlo Bergonzi usually sang with a level of good taste not common in tenors this side of Sir Peter Pears, and you might expect that to limit the voltage he generates as...

Copland's Eight Songs of Emily Dickinson comprise one of the finest song cycles by an American composer, and a perfect meeting of minds between poet and composer. Dickinson's verses and Copland's music alternate plain-spun honesty and wry humor with sudden, unpredictable bursts of passion and pai...