Premiereopera Italy: Reyer Sigurd & d'Indy Fervaal

[Alan Howe]

I want to trumpet here the excellence of a couple of opera recordings offered by Premiereopera Italy, i.e. premiereopera.net

1. The 1973 recording of Reyer's Sigurd conducted by Manuel Rosenthal. Superb sound and and an absolutely top-notch cast of French singers. Wonderful!
http://premiereopera.net/product/sigurd-by-reyer-with-massard-chauvet-paris-1973/

2. The 2009 Bern performance of d'Indy's Fervaal - in superlative sound, i.e. rather better than the recording so kindly uploaded here by BerlinExpat (which prompted my purchase of the Premiereopera version):
http://premiereopera.net/product/fervaal-by-dindy-bern-2009/
The only problem with Fervaal is where the the end-of-CD breaks fall, but I'm prepared to accept this for the sake of the overall quality of the product.

A word about presentation: each set consists of three separate CDs enclosed in nice-looking shiny paper sleeves which are protected by clear plastic envelopes of CD size. In other words, there are no plastic boxes and, of course, no libretti. The casts are printed on the reverse of the shiny paper sleeves. So: obviously a cottage industry, but a high-quality one. Heartily recommended!

[Gauk]

A nice discovery! I never knew about Premiereopera Italy before, and I see some other goodies in their catalogue.

[edurban]

And don't forget their excellent Henri viii (Saint-Saens) under Sir John Pritchard.  The usual cuts, but a generally terrific performance (barring the tenor, as usual with this opera).  Apologies for mentioning this yet again...

David

PS. Don't hesitate to ask them for other items you may not see in the current catalogue, like Angela Meade singing Mercadante's Virginia from 2010.   Or Meyerbeer's Emma di Resburgo with Vivica Genaux, also from 2010.  I don't remember seeing these listed recently...

[music613]

FYI - The recording is broken into 10 minute segments. The order of the segments on Disc 2 is INCORRECT. I am presently going through the recording and correcting the placement errors and also getting rid of the millisecond breaks between tracks. Using the orchestra score, the prologue and act one are complete. Act II contains several cuts, one of which makes absolutely no musical sense - but, there it is. Act III is in process - more later. Despite these (and whatever your response to the singing itself might be), it's a good performance - and stands as an excellent example of transposed Parsifalism (PARSIFAL - FERVAAL), etc.