Search - Various Artists :: Opera Highlights: The Collector's Edition (50 CDs)

Incredible bargain for 'canary fanciers'!

D. Wright | 05/24/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I used to own over 100 full length opera sets so could hardly be called a 'canary fancier' as people who only enjoy the highlights are sometimes labelled. However as the years passed I began to realise that I only owned some operas because they were called great and I didn't actually enjoy them all that much. I could also do without the recitative one gets between the tunes in Mozart and Rossini. I then whittled them down to about eighty which I hung on to for years. However, I was still not listening to them very much and would much more frequently play recital highlights cd's rather than the complete opera. So slightly reluctantly I decided it was time to save space and make some money and I sold the lot. With the cash I made I purchased this set for £40.



Now I've never been an expert on what are and aren't great performances (suffice is to say there are many famous names in these performances) so I will therefore concentrate on what is included and what is omitted.



The five great opera composers are all featured, four of them heavily. All four of Mozart's most popular operas are here together with Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serial.

Puccini - my favourite composer - has his five most popular, although it could have been possible to include all his works as there weren't that many more.

Wagner does have all his ten major operas included, although there are problems. It's difficult to reduce the Ring to two discs never mind one, so inevitably much is missing, most notably the great love duet 'Hiel dir Sonne!' from Siegfried. Similarly Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin and Meistersinger all have their overtures/preludes missing. This is particularly annoying as the orchestral preludes contain some of Wagner's best music. Another of my favourite moments from Lohengrin, the beautiful Act 2 duet between Elsa and Ortud, is also absent. There are also two uncredited and irritating introductory spoken tracks by some German guy at the beginning of Tannhauser - a waste of ten minutes music time!

Verdi has seven highlights: Aida, Traviata, Trovatore, Rigoletto, Nabucco, Otello and Force of Destiny, the latter also without it's excellent overture, which is annoying. It could be argued that Masked Ball and Don Carlo could also have been included as two of Verdi's major operas, if necessary at the expense of Nabucco, which apart from the famous Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves doesn't really contain Verdi's best music; whilst La Traviata and Rigoletto contain such consistently great music that some of it has to be omitted in highlights discs.

Richard Strauss is, as expected, just represented by his most popular opera, Der Rosenkavalier.

There is only one English speaking opera, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess: the celebrated Simon Rattle version. It could be argued that Britten's Peter Grimes, perhaps the other most famous English speaking opera should have been included, but there isn't an available highlights disc. This is the problem with Britten's operas and indeed Richard Strauss's other operas - because of the integrated nature of their composition it is difficult to extract highlights. Janacek is perhaps the greatest opera composer totally unrepresented.

Apart from Peter Grimes,Don Carlo and Masked Ball, perhaps the other most famous opera missing from the box is Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. I would have preferred to have this rather than the Russian opera which is included, Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov as I find Onegin much more lyrical; perhaps EMI don't have a highlights disc, although there are plenty of highlights of Onegin.

Gounod, Massenet, Bizet, Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini are each represented by their two most popular operas, while many other composers get one.

Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallos's Pagliacci share a disc, hence although there are 50 discs, 51 opera highlights are featured.

There are obviously many great one off arias missing by lesser composers such as Catalini, Cilea and Giordano. They are unrepresented as the operas these arias come from aren't in the popular repetoire. You can buy the 6 disc opera arias set, also from EMI, which would complement this set as it does feature nearly all the most famous opera arias, including ones by the lesser composers not featured here. Although another of my favourite composers, Korngold, is missing as his operas aren't in the popular repetoire, nor do you get any more Richard Strauss in the 6 disc set.

Back to this 50 cd box and the annotation is minimal as you would expect with such a bargain. You just get track listings and performers with no libretti. So if you aren't already acquainted with the opera being played you won't really know what's going on. Another irritation is that some of the discs run to less than 70 minutes, (Rossini's William Tell runs under 50 minutes!) meaning at least 10 more minutes of music could have been featured. As already pointed out, this is particularly noticeable on the Wagner, where much excellent music is left out.

I have gone down from owning complete operas to this cut price highlights set which might seem odd. I should think most people may do it the other way round and use this as a stepping stone to getting into opera more extensively, but I haven't the time nor the space these days. However, I have supplemented this with the aforementioned 6 disc EMI opera arias set and downloaded favourite extracts not included here into itunes from my complete operas before I sold them; so I still have all the opera I need! And this set could well be all the opera you need for a bargain price!



The complete opera highlights featured are:



Beethoven: Fidelio, Bellini: I Puritani, Norma, Berlioz: Les Troyens, Bizet: Carmen, Les Pecheurs de Perles. Debussy: Pelleas et Mellsande, Delibes: Lakme, Donizetti: L'elisir d'amore, Lucia di Lammermoor, Gershwin: Porgy and Bess, Gluck: Orfeo et Euridice, Gounod: Faust, Romeo et Juliette, Handel: Alcina, Mascagni: Cavallieria Rusticana, Leoncavallo: Pagliacci, Massenet: Manon, Werther, Monteverdi: L'Orfeo, Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov, Mozart: Cosi Fan Tutte, Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serial, Le Nozze di Figaro, Die Zauberflote, Don Giovanni, Offenbach: Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Puccini: La Boheme, Madama Butterfly, Maonon Lescaut, Tosca, Turandot, Rossini: Guillame Tell, Il Barbiere di Siviglia: Saint-Saens: Samson et Dalila, Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier, Verdi: Aida, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, La Forza del Destino, Nabucco, Otello, Rigoletto, Wagner: Der Fliegende Hollander, Der Ring Des Nibelungen, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, Parsifal, Tannhauser, Tristan und Isolde, Weber: Der Frieschutz."

A really pleasant surprise

Gary Paul Johnson | Los Angeles, CA United States | 05/01/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I purchased this through AMAZON at the bargain price of $60, barely $1 per disc. I thought it might serve for those times I didn't feel like listening to "all that extra stuff" that comprise great operatic performances, and just listen to the pretty songs. I hardly know an opera aficionado who doesn't feel that way now and again. That said, I am remarkably surprised at the performances included herein: Victoria de los Angeles in BUTTERFL; Grace Bumbry in extensive (76.11) excerpts from CARMEN ; Jon Vickers in FIDELIO; Jean Eaglen a very formidable NORMA; Mady Masple in LAKME. I've gone through about 2/3 of this collection and the only clunker so far has been AIDA with Brigit Nilsson and Franco Corelli (powerful but not particularly beautiful singing and uninspired conducting by Zubin Mehta) and I have never been very enchanted with Beverly Sills' Violetta. Beyond that, it only duplicates two of my complete recordings. The selections are generous, the packaging quite attractive, and the individual discs well labeled. All in all a great surprise and astounding bargain. This should be a great starter set for those just coming to opera, and a nice addendum to a discriminating personal collection."

Fantastic bargain with much great music

C. Fischer | Bloomington, IN United States | 05/02/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"An incredible amount of excellent music at a loss-leader price. You may not love all the performances but I guarantee you will love many of them and of course you could always keep the duplicates for comparative purposes. Especially for opera it's usually good to have at least two versions of the pieces you like. My main criticism is that if you want to make your own inserts, the database information of the tracks and titles these disks is WRONG and insert software will not help you here. Otherwise I would have given it 5 stars for value."