Forbes Classical CD of the Month: Les Troyens From Strasbourg With Joyce DiDonato

...It’s a long slog in the opera house and it’s a long slog if you do a dedicated sit-and-listen at home. But a bottle of good wine helps. And this recording, I think, helps, too. I certainly found myself involved by John Nelsons’ dramatic, vivid conducting, by the orchestra’s nuanced performance and by the singers’ interpretation and voices. With a few exceptions, the voices are lighter and more nimble than one is used to from these kinds of operas… and as a result increasingly responsive to a more subtle interpretation of the drama around them. Comic-operatic hyper-drama is out, as are overt, grand gestures (of the vocal type but, as the included DVD shows, also of the physical kind.) That’s refreshing and it does justice to the (thankfully) changing taste in operatic singing which, even in unrealistic, dramatically unconvincing operas, demands a greater amount of realism and restraint and less of the arm-waving and fist-shaking that used to be common – with all the emotion-motoric refinement of an anguished semaphore – on stages throughout the world…

-> Classical CD of the Month January 2018: Les Troyens From Strasbourg With Joyce DiDonato

H.Berlioz, Les Troyens, John Nelson, Strasbourg PO, Joyce DiDonato/Marie-Nicole Lemieux/Michael Spyres et al. Erato