This is one of the most surprising and wholly unexpected discoveries in the pantheon of historical opera recordings: a recording of Janácek's opera Katja Kabanova from a production prepared for the ruined, impoverished Dresden Staatsoper in August 1949, a mere month before the iron curtain fell upon East Germany. It comes from six early magnetophon tapes in the archives of Berlin radio; forgotten, it is about the only tape of its kind that wasn't "bulked" at some point or plundered by privateers. The sound quality is ...
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This is one of the most surprising and wholly unexpected discoveries in the pantheon of historical opera recordings: a recording of Janácek's opera Katja Kabanova from a production prepared for the ruined, impoverished Dresden Staatsoper in August 1949, a mere month before the iron curtain fell upon East Germany. It comes from six early magnetophon tapes in the archives of Berlin radio; forgotten, it is about the only tape of its kind that wasn't "bulked" at some point or plundered by privateers. The sound quality is excellent; state of the art for 1949, and yet that is not the only thing that is so captivating about this Katja Kabanova. It demonstrates that the Dresden opera, despite its bombed-out building and practically non-existent budget, was in excellent shape musically in the years following World War II.The performance is led by giga-obscure conductor Ernst Richter, and this might be his only extant recording, as Richter died sometime in the early 1950s. Richter's control of the Dresden...
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