Catalog

Here we have the first complete CD recording of the final Gilbert and Sullivan romantic comic operetta written in 1896, set in the imaginary land of Pfennig-Halbpfennig. It was recorded at the Ohio Light Opera Company's 25th anniversary season in 2003. After Utopia Unlimited (1893), Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated -- briefly and unsuccessfully -- with other partners. D'Oyly Carte brought the two together again in 1895, when they began work on what would be their 14th and final light opera. With an unintended symbolism, The Grand Duke brought their joint careers full circle: many of the ingredients of this plot echoed those of their first collaborative efforts of more than twenty years earlier. When The Grand Duke opened at the Savoy Theater on March 7, 1896, the reviews ranged from enthusiastic to disappointed. It ran for 123 performances, not a success by G & S standards, and was never again performed professionally in England until D'Oyly Carte presented a concert version in 1975, with a recording of only Sullivan's music (omitting Gilbert's extensive, but very entertaining, dialogue). After the premiere, Sullivan wrote a friend: "Why reproach me? I didn't write the book...another week's rehearsal with W.S.G. and I should have gone raving mad." Of the work itself, librettist Gilbert complained: "I am not a proud mother, and I never want to see the misshapen little brat again." Their well-documented dysfunctional relationship aside, The Grand Duke contains much hilarious material and charming music. It is great to have it here in its first complete CD recording with all the delightful dialogue included.

Along with his brother, the symphonist Adolfs Skulte (1909-2000), Bruno Skulte represented a bridge between the Romantic era and the blooming of modern Latvian music. After arriving in the U.S. in 1949 he devoted his energies to Latvian music festivals and choir directing. This nationalistic opera was one of his crowning achievements, and we are proud to present this first recording.

America's premiere opera composer here presents his first full-length comic opera, based on the classic farce "A Flea in Her Ear" by Feydeau. But here, the composer, working from his own libretto, has set the work on a ranch in Texas in the 1940s. The original source's hilarious story of supposed infidelities and the characters' outlandish attempts at getting even without finding out the truth of the matter translates wonderfully to the new setting and, indeed, at the first Lexington performances both critics and audiences were delighted by the new work. This represents the latest in an ongoing project with Albany and Pasatieri to record his major stage works (the most recent being the acclaimed "Frau Margot") and we're certain you'll share in the high spirits and fun that the Kentucky audiences had!

Scott Eyerly received his master's degree from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Elliott Carter, and his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan School of Music, where he studied with William Bolcom and Curtis Curtis-Smith. He currently lives in New York City. About his opera he writes: "In 1989, while seeking a story for my first opera, I picked up a copy of The House of the Seven Gables. It was love at first read. What seized my imagination immediately was the atmosphere and the characters. Vivid stage pictures suggested themselves to me, from the vast gloomy house to its singular characters. I was drawn to the powerful morality in the tale. Hawthorne's exploration of human nature, especially the repercussions of one's actions on others, struck me as being no less relevant today than in 1850. Having received a grant in 1992 from the National Endowment for the Arts to begin writing the opera, I spent six weeks in Salem, Massachusetts, where the actual House of the Seven Gables stands. Although the story is fictional, it is set in a real house. The chance to see what Hawthorne had seen intrigued me. Seven years were to pass between my Salem visit and the Manhattan School's announcement of the opera's premiere." With the current opera craze on the part of classical music lovers, here is a new opera which should have a broad appeal to anyone who enjoys the voice.

Jacques Offenbach's mini opéra bouffe L'île de Tulipatan was premiered in September 1868 in Paris and was wildly successful. The hilarious plot, set on a South Seas island, involves cross-dressing and gender confusions, and features a tuneful score. It travelled to Germany and Austria the year following its premier and to the U.K. three seasons later. This charming operetta was recorded live at Radio France in the late 1950s and again in the 1980s, both French-language. The present English translation by Gregg Opelka and Jack Helbig was created in 2003. This recording, from the Light Opera of New York's Spring 2017 live New York City production, is the first for the work in English. The entire Offenbach score is heard with Opelka's lyrics, along with a slightly truncated version of Helbig's snappy spoken dialogue.

The Kona Coffee Cantata originated, appropriately enough, over coffee and conversation in 1981 between composer Jerre Tanner and Christine Jones, a classical music lover and co-owner of The Coffee Cantata, a coffee shop in Kailua-Kona on Hawaii Island. Jones suggested that Tanner write a companion piece to Bach's Coffee Cantata. Tanner and his librettist agreed to create a Baroque Hawaiian Style for the new work. Says Tanner: "We would combine Baroque musical traditions with Hawaiian musical traditions as seamlessly as possible looking for a common ground between the two so that our audience would accept this cross-cultural hybrid." The listener can hear recitativo secco, arias with instrumental obbligatos, cabalettas displaying vocal pyrotechnics, fugues, chorale preludes, florid ornamentation and those sturdy Baroque walking bass lines. On the Hawaiian side, there are hints of ancient chant and hula rhythms sounded by the ipu hula - a traditional drum-like instrument used for the dance. The rest of the Orchestra is made up of strings, flute and basso continuo, the same instrumentation as Bach's Coffee Cantata. As well, just like the Bach work, Tanner's Cantata uses three characters sung by a soprano, tenor and bass. The work received its premiere in a somewhat abbreviated version by the Uptown Opera at Lindaman's Gourmet-to-Go Restaurant in Spokane, Washington on November 13, 1986. Jerre Tanner is the composer of Boy With Goldfish which is also available on Albany TROY353.

Based on the story by Ray Bradbury, this marvelous chamber opera was composed by Lawrence Rapchak between September 1988 and February 1989. It was given its world premiere performance on April 21, 1990 by the same forces heard on this recording. As with so many contemporary operas, the libretto is riveting. Here is a synopsis: Juan Diaz, a poor peasant, dies after a lifetime of failing to provide for his wife Maria and their three children. On his deathbed, he promises to somehow help care for them from beyond the grave. A year after the death, the malevolent gravedigger Alejandro cheats Maria and unearths the body of her late husband, placing it on display in the catacombs. The loyal and courageous Maria then manages to steal the body and evade the gravedigger's charges of theft. She then places the body on an altar in her home, thus creating a small museum of her own, and charges admission to the tourists who come to celebrate the Day of the Dead. Through her actions she has made it possible for Juan to keep his deathbed pledge by providing income for his family.

For a century and a quarter Gilbert and Sullivan's hilarious 1885 comic opera, The Mikado, has elicited joyous shouts and cheers from audiences the world over--and it has survived triumphant, even in the face of controversial productions and oddball casting. This recording, taken from the Ohio Light Opera's 2008 Festival performances, includes all the music as well as the complete dialogue.

Long overdue, this recording of Virgil Thomson's 1947 opera with libretto by Gertrude Stein by the Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater, makes a major American opera available. The opera, commissioned by the Alice A. Ditson Fund, tells the story of Susan B. Anthony, but Stein's approach mixes real and fictional characters from different historical periods. Premiered at Columbia University, the opera impressed the distinguished audience and press, but neither of New York's major opera companies took on the work. Thomson's music, a continuation of his style of making text come alive through natural inflections and sparing instrumental supports, is suggestive of its American theme with fanfares, political songs, Salvation Army-style marches and parlor songs.

Even for those of a "certain age" (i.e., baby-boomers) who never followed classical music, there is the indelible memory of "Amahl and the Night Visitors," Menotti's warm, wonderful Christmas opera, one of the first commissioned for television's early days. Some dozen years earlier, the composer, only 27, had been commissioned by the same company for the very first opera for radio, "The Old Maid and the Thief." Menotti began writing songs at an early age and studied at the Curtis Institute where he began a lifelong friendship with Samuel Barber, won a Pulitzer Prize for his first full-length opera "The Consul," and oversaw the famed Spoleto Festival, beginning in 1958. Menotti's delicate, tuneful music was almost a modern counterpart to the music of Rossini, full of high spirits, color and equal amounts of drama. This first recording of "The Old Maid and The Thief" in nearly 40 years is a wonderful memorial for the composer who died earlier this year.

Before departing for New York to conduct the premier of Pirates on New Year's Eve, 1879, Sullivan had completed sketches for the first act, intending to finish the opera after his voyage. Upon arrival, he discovered he'd left the first act at home. Following an all-night reconstruction, the New York rehearsals began while the composer hastily created the second act, finishing everything only hours before the premiere. The show as a success and ran for more than three months. The Pirates of Penzance remains popular today, taking its place along with The Mikado and H.M.S. Pinafore as one of the most frequently played Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

Producer Charles Dillingham constructed a rotating red mill sign with electric lights outside the Knickerbocker Theater to signal the premiere of The Red Mill on September 24, 1906. The next day, the New York Herald proclaimed "The Red Mill will grind its grist of mirth, music and melody for a long time to come," a prophecy borne out by 274 Broadway performances and an extensive tour. A 1945 revival at the Ziegfeld Theater enjoyed an even longer run of 531 performances. Henry Blossom fashioned the text for Herbert to highlight the vaudeville antics of the celebrated comedy pair of Montgomery and Stone, who had triumphed earlier as the Scarecrow and the Tin Man in a stage version of The Wizard of Oz. Their names appeared in ads for the new musical at a size which dwarfed both the composer's and even the musical's title. The Times declared The Red Mill to be a show "to cheer the heart, delight the eye, charm the ear, tickle the fancy and wreath the face in smiles." Irish by birth, Victor Herbert became an American citizen, served as principal cellist with the Metropolitan Orchestra, later soloed in his own compositions under such renowned conductors as Walter Damrosch and Anton Seidl and also conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony. It is interesting to note that Victor Herbert orchestrated standing up. He often said standing up was the only thing that kept him awake. It has also been said that Herbert was a Sullivan without a Gilbert, meaning his librettos were much weaker than the music, although Henry Blossom, the librettist for The Red Mill was probably the best of the lot.

The Refuge is the fruition of the Houston Grand Opera's commitment to connect with its community. The brainchild of General Director Anthony Freud, the idea was to commission an opera based on the experiences of the ethnically-varied immigrants who make Houston their home. The libretto, written by Leah Lax, is based on the oral histories of families from Africa, Central America, Vietnam, Pakistan and India who have made their way to Houston and made it their home. Their courageous journeys make this an American opera in the truest sense. Their stores are eloquently captured in music by the Houston-native, Christopher Theofanidis.

"Over 28 years have passed since the premiere of The Seagull, half a lifetime for me. Of my 17 operas, it remains my favorite child. The musical atmosphere has changed greatly in the interim and the lyric, romantically tonal is no longer the exception, but now the standard. Critics are no longer shocked by a flow of melody from composers, and the love of audiences for a new work is no longer suspect. For this production, I have written two new interludes to accompany the act divisions and stagecraft. As I wrote them, I was flooded with the feelings of my 26 year old self and so grateful that this opera has survived and is still being produced. It has been twenty years since I have written an opera and I have in all that time refused to do so. But now, my heart and mind have changed and as I poured over the score for this New York production, and in preparation for next season's in San Francisco, I begin to hear faintly in the back of my mind... music...operatic music. Perhaps soon, there might be number 18."

Recorded at the premiere performance by the Center for Contemporary Opera in March, 2011, The Secret Agent, with libretto by J.D. McClatchy based on Joseph Conrad's story, has since been presented at the Armel Opera Festival in Hungary and the Opéra Théatre d'Avignon in France. Though the original story was written in 1907, it remains chillingly relevant today in our terror-haunted world. OnStage noted that " in the tradition of "Makropulos Affair," "From the House of the Dead," "Wozzeck" and "Pelléas et Mélisande"— its music is urgent, agitated and intense, with occasional lyrical interludes." This is composer Michael Dellaira's third opera and his first collaboration with the noted librettist J.D. McClatchy.

First performed in 1986 by the Des Moines Opera with Jacque Trussel as Caliban, the opera has come full circle with this recording of the Purchase Opera where Jacque Trussel served as director. Hoiby, born in Wisconsin in 1926, was infused with operatic ambitions during his studies at Curtis with Gian Carlo Menotti. He has written a number of operas, including several on Albany Records (A Month in the Country, Bon Appetit!, and This Is the Rill Speaking).

By the early 1950s, Aaron Copland had become a skilled composer of dramatic music for the stage and screen, with five ballets and seven film scores to his credit. In fact, Copland judged his film work to have been "excellent preparation for operatic writing. At the time I was composing for films, I believed that it was a new form of dramatic music, related to opera, ballet and theatre music, and that it should be explored for its own unique possibilities". Thus, all the elements were in place for Copland's consideration of a commission offered him by the League of Composers in 1952. They were seeking to follow up the enormous success of Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors on NBC Television Theatre during the 1951 Christmas holidays with another television opera, again to be produced and broadcast by NBC. When the opera was finished, NBC reneged on the production without offering any substantive reasons, and the completed opera, nearly two years in the making would have remained unperformed, had not the New York City Center Opera decided to present the premiere of this prominent composer's work. However, the cavernous space of City Center dwarfed the intimate television opera. The result was a lukewarm initial response from the critics and crowds. Basically the music was praised and the libretto was criticized. As the years passed, many realized that the scope of The Tender Land is perfect for smaller budgets and budding talents. Copland himself acknowledged that a college production is perhaps the most congenial atmosphere for this opera. How pleased we are to be able to present this wonderful recording by the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre. Accompanied by the full orchestra, conducted by the fine American conductor, Kirk Trevor, it is marvelous.

The 15th century poet Francois Villon, between scrapes with the law in Paris, wrote lyrics both poignant and bawdy. At the end of the 19th century, novelist R.H. Russell sentimentalized his career in a plot that borrowed the king-for-a-day motif, thus allowing Villon to defeat France's enemies and win the hand of an aristocratic lady, all in under 24 hours. Adapted as a play in 1901, by New York writer Justin McCarthy, If I Were King served as a star vehicle for E.H. Southern in a Broadway stage production. In 1923, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart were at the very start of their careers. They devised a musical version of the McCarthy play for a Manhattan girl's school and then looked for a more prestigious venue for their collaboration. Broadway backers turned down the young artists, but liked their idea, "borrowed" it from Rodgers and Hart and commissioned the more established Rudolf Friml to fashion a professional musical from the plot. Friml's Rose Marie was then enjoying great success in New York. Born in what is today the Czech Republic in 1897, Friml enrolled at age 14 in the Prague Conservatory (which was headed by Dvorak) and completed the six-year course in three years. He toured Europe and the United States as accompanist for violinist Jan Kubelik and made a piano debut in this country onstage at Carnegie Hall in 1904. Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony premiered his Piano Concerto two seasons later, with the composer at the piano. Friml's true calling was as a composer of songs. In 1912, he was called in by Arthur Hammerstein to complete the music for a new work which Victor Herbert had abandoned, owing to a run-in with a temperamental soprano. The resulting operetta, The Firefly, was his first Broadway success, and would be followed by many others. Friml continued to live in America for much of the 20th century long after his sentimental musical style was considered old fashioned. As late as 1969, he was celebrated by Ogden Nash on the occasion of his 90th birthday in a couplet which ended: "I trust your conclusion and mine are similar: It would be a happier world if it were Frimler."

Since establishing Ohio Light Opera in 1979, The College of Wooster has upheld the goals of providing young musicians with an opportunity to perform in a professional setting and of entertaining audiences with operettas which have charmed the publics of an earlier era. Liberal arts colleges are, in the words of President R. Stanton Hales, "national treasures which have provided the ideals for American undergraduate education." Of these small and independent treasures, Wooster is one of the brightest. A recent study measured the leading 50 colleges in three critical areas Ð educating scientists, educating leaders in international affairs, and educating business executives. Wooster is only one of 21 colleges to earn a place in all three groups. It is also a school that is dedicated to the performing arts with strong programs in theater and music. Steven Daigle, the artistic director for the company says: "The Ohio Light Opera Company is happy to offer Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard. No other festival here or abroad can boast a company that has dedicated itself for 25 years to the preservation and traditional presentation of all forms of opera. This "operetta haven," supported by the Wooster community has set a unique standard to which many performing arts companies aspire."

Thomas Sleeper's Einstein's Inconsistency is a series of eight operas, the longest being about 20 minutes with the shortest just under a minute. On the surface, the operas seem unrelated, but each acts as a sort of mosaic tile to create a treatise on the very nature of existence. What all the characters have in common (a king, a bureaucrat, a critic, a grieving man, a heretic, a priest, a paranoid woman, and finally God) is that they are all at the brink of discovering what it means to exist. When taken as a whole, Einstein's Inconsistency takes the listener into a sort of sonic funhouse. One cannot experience this work and remain unaltered by it. It is clearly a deeply personal piece for the composer and contains some of his most inventive and powerful music to date.

Jake Heggie composed this musical play in three acts for Frederica von Stade, who has had a large influence on his composing career. Heggie was working in the press office of the San Francisco Opera when he first met von Stade. She listened to some of his songs and became so enthused that Heggie received a commission for his first opera. Three Decembers is taken from a play titled Some Christmas Letters and tells the story of the emotional lives of three people: mother, adult daughter and son through letters and phone calls during three Decembers in three different decades of their lives.

Here Albany Records is privileged to present the world premiere recording of this wonderful new opera by the American composer Tod Machover who was recently called brilliantly gifted by The New York Times and “America’s most wired composer” by the Los Angeles Times. He is highly regarded for music that boldly breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries, offering a unique and innovative synthesis of acoustic and electronic sound, of symphony orchestras and interactive computers, of operatic arias and rock songs, and that consistently delivers serious and powerful messages in an accessible and immediate way. As Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Lloyd Schwartz has written: “What’s most exciting about Machover’s pieces in general is how beautiful and moving they are, what lyrical and exotic melismas keep surfacing (and how scintillatingly they contrast with the shattering electronic textures), how dramatically they build, how they haven’t a dull moment, and what magnificent opportunities for performers they provide.” Machover has composed five operas in quite diverse forms, from the science fiction VALIS, commissioned for the tenth anniversary of Paris’ Centre Pompidou, to the walk-through Meteorite, permanently installed in Essen, Germany since 1998. His celebrated audience-interactive Brain Opera was the hit of the 1996 Lincoln Center Festival, and is now permanently installed at the House of Music in Vienna. Resurrection received a new production at Boston Lyric Opera in 2001/2002. Machover is also noted for inventing new technology for music, especially his Hyperinstruments that use smart computers to augment musical expression and creativity for virtuosi, amateurs and children. The latest application of Machover’s hyperinstruments is for the creation of Music Toys that will enable children to collaborate creatively with orchestras around the world in his Toy Symphony project, which premieres in Europe in Spring 2002 before traveling to the United States and Asia. Machover is currently working on new operas for the Opera of Monte-Carlo and New York City Opera. He was formerly Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM Institute in Paris. He received his degrees in musical composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions. Currently, Machover is Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Laboratory, head of the Lab’s Opera of the Future group, and Director of its new Centre for Future Arts. He is also a Founding Member of MediaLabEurope in Dublin.

Glory Denied, the new opera by Tom Cipullo, is the saga of Col. Jim Thompson, the longest-held American POW in U.S. history. Cipullo’s dramatic chamber opera based on the 2001 oral history by Tom Philpott, was recorded live with cast and ensemble of the 2013 Fort Worth Opera Festival. Glory Denied is a distinctly American story encapsulating something of the moral essence of the Vietnam War and the bitterness of the war’s legacy. Tom Cipullo’s score is beautiful and chilling and returns us to a transformative era in our nation’s history.

Rarely, if ever, has a successful Broadway show received such unanimously rave reviews, yet disappeared so quickly as Victor Herbert's 1906 Dream City & The Magic Knight. The show traces its genesis to attempts by the celebrated vaudeville team of Lew Fields and Joe Weber to interest Victor Herbert in writing music for one of their shows. Herbert had no interest in writing for vaudeville, but when Weber went out on his own as a producer, he contracted with Herbert for a comic opera. Billed as a "Dramatic Pipe in Two Puffs," the show's zany first act was in the musical comedy style; in the middle of the second act as an operatic burlesque, spoofing the conventions of grand opera, particularly Wagner's Lohengrin. The Ohio Light Opera offers a new performance edition, with complete music and dialogue recorded live at the 2014 Summer Festival.

By the time composer Victor Herbert began work in 1905 on his comic opera Mlle. Modiste, he already had 14 Broadway shows to his credit and a reputation as America's most prominent composer of stage music. With Metropolitan Opera star Fritzi Scheff in the title role of Fifi, the hatgirl with dreams of a stage career, Mlle. Modiste opened on Christmas Day of 1905 and ran for 202 performances. Herbert's musical score remains one of the supreme gems in the American operetta canon and it is fitting that the Ohio Light Opera celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth with this delightful operetta.

Victor Herbert and Fred de Gresac’s wonderful 1922 score, Orange Blossoms, is the story of an hilarious culture clash between Americans and Parisians in the Roaring Twenties in the French capital and on the Riviera. Orange Blossoms, written late in Herbert’s career, reflected the public’s new interest in the jazz age and musical comedy. Director Michael Phillips liberally adapted the original three-act musical into a streamlined two-act version accentuating the most unique and innovative aspects of the script and lyrics. The Light Opera of New York was founded in 2006 as a professional company devoted to the performance of staged operettas and operetta concerts.

Victor Herbert's three-act 1914 score (Henry Blossom's song lyrics) -- the clash between a young female composer and an egotistical Broadway librettist based on a play by Frank Mandel, is offered in a new performance edition by Michael Phillips. His revision resulted in a reworking of the lengthy Mandel-Blossom dialog, entailed some minor repositioning of several musical numbers, but left Herbert's score and Blossom's actual song lyrics intact. All music is presented on this recording with a truncated version of Phillips' snappy book. The score is charming with the solo cello prominent and the lead soprano getting the best song, explained by Victor Herbert's own distinguished career as a cellist and his wife's position with the Met Opera.

Villa Diodati, composed by Mira J. Spektor with libretto by Colette Inez, features the poetry of notorious Romantic poets Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth. The plot revolves around the fateful events of Summer, 1816, when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley penned Frankenstein while staying at the Villa Diodati in Geneva with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. A contemporary American couple on a Swiss train find themselves thrown into the past and into the villa on the dreary summer day when Mrs. Shelley is creating her monster. Later that night, Mary will be haunted by her creation and also by the ghost of her Mother, the British feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The famous couples fantasize of ghosts and monsters while privately facing their inner demons. Today the haunted Villa Diodati still stands as a landmark, overlooking Lake Geneva. The piece was filmed live at the York Theatre at Saint Peter's Church in New York City, produced by Bank Street Films, starring the beautiful young singers Rachel Arky, Angela Leson, Mike Longo, Jeremy Moore, Hillary Schranze and Rachel Zadkoff. The New York Times (Allan Kozinn) wrote that the vocal setting "recalled some of the more graceful music in Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti" and characterized as particularly appealing a duet between Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, "There is no heaven but my love." Reviewing the opera during the New York Musical Theater Festival in 2008, Talkin' Broadway wrote, "Mira J. Spektor (music) and Colette Inez (lyrics) have imbued their show with all the classic elements of success — luxurious love, vibrant-voiced performers, lush poetry, and a visionary director...The unabashedly operatic music wraps you in the warm embrace of the writings timeless romanticism. You'll probably hear no better musical all this year than Villa Diodati."