Episodes

For the final episode of 2025, and of Season Six of the podcast, I present pure frothy escapism from the delectable Mady Mesplé, the finest French coloratura of her generation. My original intention was to feature her exclusively in operetta repertoire, and I’ve stuck to that. But as I began to compile a setlist I realized that there was a subset of her recordings of this repertoire that presented her at her absolute finest: Viennese operetta, as translated into French. From her earliest recordi...

A holiday gift for my beloved listeners. In the past year I have done Countermelody episodes featuring both soprano April Cantelo and mezzo-soprano Maureen Lehane. Cantelo in particular sang roles in numerous operas by the Australian composer Malcolm Williamson, On a sojourn to New York in 2024, I was lucky to pick up a rare copy of Williamson’s 1965 children’s opera The Happy Prince, based on the Oscar Wilde fairy tale, a recording which features both Cantelo and Lehane. As I am not normally en...

Another episode of Christmas music! The first part is a continuation of the previous All-Tenor Holiday Extravaganza. We hear from Luther Saxon, Roland Hayes, James Melton, Brian Sullivan, Richard Crooks, Raoul Jobin, Jussi Björling, Richard Verreau, Fritz Wunderlich, Rudolf Schock, René Kollo, John McCormack, Peter Schreier, and Mel Tormé (with an assist from Judy herself!) And for those who have ambivalent feelings about this holiday, the final third of the program foregrounds six of my most fa...

This week I present two episodes featuring Christmas music which I originally produced six years ago, in the earliest days of Countermelody. Both episodes zero in on tenors; I’ll be republishing them both this week. This first episode features a panoply of superb tenors (including Georges Thill, Richard Lewis, Roland Hayes, Tino Rossi, Franco Corelli, Ernst Haefliger, Richard Tauber, Charles Holland, Karl Erb, and Matthew Swensen) in repertoire ranging across the spectrum (Handel, Adam, Gounod, ...

Today, December 19, would have been my late mother’s 90th birthday. These past three months since her death have been so emotionally draining for me, and would have been even without the shitshow that the world has become in that time. On the other hand, I have been able to appreciate more fully the complicated bond that she and I shared. At the time of her death, I did two memorial tributes to “Jane’s Divas” and today, in honor of her birthday, I present a singer that we both adored, the Dutch ...

Today I was torn between bringing you an episode with trashy secular holiday songs or taking the high road with the Christmas portion of Paul Hindemith’s Das Marienleben cycle, featuring recordings by Jennie Tourel and Erich Itor Kahn (in the songs) preceded by Lotte Lehmann, reading from the original Rainer Maria Rilke poetry cycle. I chose the high road, and I think that I chose wisely. Neither Lehmann’s nor Tourel’s exceptionally beautiful recordings was ever reissued in any format, and these...

Anytime I do an episode on Fritz Wunderlich, the sun breaks through the clouds, emotionally speaking. Possessor of a bright-timbred voice of such exquisite beauty anchored by a profoundly satisfying musical sensibility, he and his legacy inspire rather than sadden me. Today I’ve chosen a duet program, because it allows me to showcase Fritz’s effortless stylistic flexibility, while at the same time highlighting a rainbow of singing partners, some of whom are old favorites, and others of whom migh...

This episode celebrates the artistic accomplishments of two of the finest twentieth century singers to come from the environs of Dresden, Peter Schreier and Olaf Bär. Both were former child choristers in the Dresdner Kreuzchor (albeit from two different generations). Both went on as adults to rise to the top of the musical firmament, particularly in their performance of German art song. Each of these two singers were celebrated in the music of Bach, and in their performance of what their fellow ...

Okay, I confess that the title of this week’s episode is intentionally misleading, but if I told you what it actually was outright, you might not listen, and that would be a great loss! On Monday I celebrated Larry Kert for World AIDS Day, and today, I have made a selection of musical settings of the Marian Antiphon Salve Regina, which translated means, “Hail, Queen,” so there you have the inspiration for the episode. In fact, this is an episode chock-full of particularly glorious singing, and I...

Today is World AIDS Day, if anyone needed to be reminded. Though I considered doing a compendium episode of broad scope commemorating a handful of the thousands upon thousands of musicians that succumbed to AIDS, I decided instead to focus on one, Broadway icon Larry Kert, who created the role of Tony in West Side Story and was subsequently an early Robert in Sondheim’s Company, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. On December 5, we observe his 95th birthday. In between these career high...

As I sat yesterday pondering all my friends, family, and compatriots celebrating Thanksgiving, my thoughts turned to the turkey, the traditional sacrificial creature for this event. And whatever the avian counterpart of a rabbit hole is, that’s where my thoughts turned as I realized that a tribute to our feathered friends in general would make a nice, lightweight, potpourri episode as we once again hurtle into the final preparations for the holiday season. As my list of possible repertoire explo...

Every hundred or so episodes, I feel compelled to pay a return visit to beloved Hungarian diva Sylvia Sass, for there’s always something new and delicious to discover! I’ve cleaned up another former bonus episode and expanded it with a half-dozen extra tracks, from Verdi to Mozart, from her definitive Bluebeard’s Castle to arie antiche topped with a bracing blast of verismo. Then I link up with the previously published bonus episode which samples live excerpts from the two legendary 1976 Verdi p...

This past September 19th, we observed the anniversary of the death in 1992 of the great Welsh bass-baritone Geraint Evans at the age of 70. A vivid actor and a skilled singer, he both began and ended his career at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, but was a treasured guest at opera houses all over the globe. In 1966, London/Decca records released a recording designed to give full display to his musical, stylistic, and dramatic versatility. In its US issue it was entitled, appropriately enough...

Today some real meat and potatoes Italian opera. Oh, wait, perhaps we should call it spaghetti alla bolognese rather than meat and potatoes. So often on the podcast I bring singers to the fore that are not as well known as some of the biggest stars in opera. But today I bring you both Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni, two of the most popular and celebrated Italian opera stars in the history of opera, especially opera in the late twentieth century. As many already know, the two singers both gr...

An old LP of Tōru Takemitsu’s Coral Island and a conversation with a new friend about American Exceptionalism inspired today’s episode, the “International Edition” of my ongoing series on Orchestral Song. Coral Island is still here, although I ended up using a later (and better) recording than the one in my collection. I also feature the work of composers Karol Szymanowski, Augustyn Bloch, Aminollah Hossein, Kaija Saariaho, Frederic Mompou, Ottorino Respighi, Fartein Valen, Bohuslav Martinů, and...

If we have to live in a world of extremes, I want it to be a world in which Magda Olivero reigns supreme. Her artistry combined both integrity (personal, vocal, and artistic), alongside originality and fearless risk-taking. She was never afraid to go out on a limb and it was this quality (alongside her extraordinary longevity) that endeared her to so many opera lovers. Today I have culled my Olivero collection and combined excerpts from a number of rare albums in my collection with material cull...

Today’s potpourri episode is a special one for anyone who has ever studied voice in a college, university or conservatory. One of the primary sources of repertoire for instructors of singing has been a book first published by G. Schirmer in 1894 entitled Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias, consisting primarily of arie antiche, i.e. songs from the Italian baroque (Caldara, Monteverdi, Scarlatti, Durante, and others), heavily edited, and often virtually rewritten, by musicologist Theodore Baker. ...

The great French soprano Rachel Yakar died on 24 June 2023 at the age of 87. As she frequently performed opposite our last subject, Swiss tenor Eric Tappy, this episode makes a suitable pendant to that one. Celebrated for her transcendent performances of Baroque music, (Monteverdi and the French Baroque in particular), Yakar was (like previous podcast subjects Eugene Holmes, Oralia Domínguez, Hana Janků, Gwendolyn Killebrew, and Teresa Żylis-Gara) also a member of ensemble of the Deutsche Oper a...

Swiss tenor Eric Tappy (19 May 1931 – 11 June 2024) excelled in so many different musical styles, eras, and genres, that when one considers his artistic achievement systematically, as a whole, one is positively stunned at all that he achieved, and that within a relatively short international career that extended barely 20 years. In addition, at the beginning of his career, his voice was that of a light lyric tenor, but gradually he came to sing heavier roles such as Idomeneo and Tito. The episod...

The last of my festive potpourri episodes for this, my birthday month, this episode focuses on a favorite vocal range of this opera queen: the soprano voice, in all its variety and glory. Included are such pristine lyric voices as Erika Köth, Benita Valente (who just departed us last weekend, shortly after celebrating her 91st birthday), Judith Raskin, Judith Blegen, Mattiwilda Dobbs, and Edith Mathis, among others; medium- to heavier-weight lyric voices such as Pilar Lorengar, Delia Rigal, Tere...

Today’s episode is the latest installment in my series entitled “Rescue Mission,” which reintroduces great singers who have already been featured on the podcast. This is the Belated Birthday edition of that series, which reintroduces us to a wide range of Countermelody favorites, including jazz singer Ethel Ennis; baritones Robert Massard, Gérard Souzay, and Andrzej Hiolski; sopranos Sylvia Sass (pictured), Veronica Tyler, April Cantelo, Elly Ameling, Gloria Davy, Margaret Marshall, Rosanna Cart...

A brand-new episode today inaugurating a series of episodes belatedly celebrating my birthday that will see us through to the end of the month. I have so many singers, composers, and topics in which I am interested and hope to devote full episodes to in the near future. This is the first of two episodes focusing on baritones (and a few bass-baritones) who have not yet received full Countermelody treatment. Among the singers included: Josef Metternich, Tom Krause, Walter Berry, Theodor Uppman (pi...

This is an episode I never dreamed I would have to produce. But alas, the great Roberta Alexander has unexpectedly departed this earth this past Tuesday evening, on the three-week anniversary of my beloved mother’s death. Listeners to Countermelody know how much I revered her artistry, and how much I valued our special friendship. In fact, just last week as David and I escaped for a few days to the Netherlands for my birthday, I had been in touch with Roberta, hoping that we could see each other...

The extraordinary Ina Souez (1903 – 1992), was one of the few Native American singers to achieve worldwide fame on the operatic stage. Though her career was truncated by the collapse of her European career because of the impending World War, Souez’s place in the history of recorded sound is assured by virtue of her participation in the series of Mozart operas as produced by HMV in the mid-1930s as souvenirs of the first seasons of the Glyndebourne Festival. Indeed, one could argue that her Fiord...