Miscellaneous

Exciting things this week! Joyce DiDonato’s ‘best of’ album, ‘Rejoyce’ has been available in the US since I think Tuesday. I have not bought it, mostly because I have pretty much everything that’s on it already. One of the few tracks I don’t have is a little snippet of Monteverdi from L’Incoronazione di Poppea, which is excerpted from a recording of early baroque operatic laments; the recording is called Lamenti, and in addition to DiDonato contains performances from a lot of other people you’ve heard of before. I feel obligated to add that the conductor is Emmanuelle Haïm, who – such is my understanding, at least; I haven’t obtained the CD yet – manages to get through the entire recording without fatally distracting the musicians of Le Concert d’Astrée! Go figure. But anyway, I’m thinking I might go for Lamenti over Rejoyce-ing.

And in other news, word on the street is that Dorothea Röschmann has just recorded a recital CD which we should all have in our hot little hands sometime early next year. My first impulse is to wonder what the hell took her so long. My second impulse is to set up some sort of betting pool as to its potential contents.

Finally, remember that recording of Haydn’s Jahreszeiten that Arkivmusic so fatally mislabled? I decided in the end that I wanted it anyway, because it’s conducted by Harnoncourt and involves some soloists I rather like. I’m listening to it right now. And with this CD, you get a bonus (I guess): four postcards, of the seasons in question, plus one featuring the cover art of the album:

I have never encountered this with a CD or DVD before, though it strikes me that this is a kind of thing that might be done more often. I mean, who wouldn’t want to receive a postcard featuring, say, a still from that production of Così fan tutte where Fiordiligi drinks the blue poison?