NI 5753

Franz Schreker und Ausdruckstanz

In 1907 two sisters, Grete and Elsa Wiesenthal, left the ballet corps of the Vienna Court Opera to devote themselves to the new realm of interpretive dance known as Ausdruckstanz. By 1908 they had many enthusiastic admirers, including Gustav Klimt, who invited the sisters to appear at the Kunstschau of 1908. The principal work of the Wiesenthals’ Kunstschau performances was a pantomime based on Oscar Wilde’s The Birthday of the Infanta with music commissioned from a then little-known composer by the name of Franz Schreker. The premiere on 27 June 1908 was an immediate success. Between 1908 and 1910 Schreker created six dance works that were either commissioned or inspired by the Wiesenthal sisters. This CD presents the first integral recording of the five works that survive.

NI 7927/8

Prima Voce - Enrico Caruso In Song Volume 3

When Caruso died his obituary in The Times included the sentence "It is quite safe to say that no tenor voice equal to his, in its combination of power and extreme beauty of quality, has been heard in this generation." Most of us who are familiar with his recordings would, I believe, add the words "Nor has there been since" - I am certainly not aware that any of Caruso’s successors has ever claimed to be his equal. The selection contained on these two CDs, ranging as it does from the lightest-hearted of Tchaikovsky songs via sundry numbers of a religious nature to Neapolitan songs and Edwardian drawingroom ballads, may perhaps be regarded as less artistically ‘important’ than the operatic recordings, but Caruso was not a singer who lowered his standards when singing ‘light’ music. There is hardly a single track amongst the forty-four in this selection which does not make the listener think at one moment or another "Only Caruso could have done that!"