The Lyrita label has mostly specialized in historical radio recordings of forgotten British orchestral repertory, but it has been steadily building a similar catalog of opera, and this BBC studio-to-broadcast recording of Lennox Berkeley's Nelson, recorded in 1983, is a notable entry. The label always chooses its music cannily, and the commercial success of many of its releases, despite indifferent-or-worse sound quality, may be an indication that larger labels aren't giving the people what they want. Nelson is a case in ...
Read More
The Lyrita label has mostly specialized in historical radio recordings of forgotten British orchestral repertory, but it has been steadily building a similar catalog of opera, and this BBC studio-to-broadcast recording of Lennox Berkeley's Nelson, recorded in 1983, is a notable entry. The label always chooses its music cannily, and the commercial success of many of its releases, despite indifferent-or-worse sound quality, may be an indication that larger labels aren't giving the people what they want. Nelson is a case in point. Berkeley later made his peace with some aspects of serialist composition, but this opera, first performed in 1954, shows no trace of it. Berkeley was a student of Nadia Boulanger, and he took a kind of French concision from her, but this is a grand opera in every sense of the word, and it's a bit disorienting to hear such a thing from the mid-1950s. The effect is something like what might have happened if a young Ravel had set out to emulate Verdi. The libretto is by Alan...
Read Less
