Monday Morning Music

2/09/2015 06:46:00 AM
Tweetable
Here's a beautiful aria from Salieri's opera L'Europa riconosciuta:Most performances of Salieri--and most of the other lost transition-era composers--these days are by amateur musicians, not major opera companies, and I think as a result they get somewhat unfairly judged. Salieri himself wrote his music for the top talent in the world of his day, meaning that his music is quite difficult (more difficult than many of Mozart's works, who often wrote for musicians with limited abilities and less prestigious venues). Bucking this trend, however, the clip above comes from La Scala, a top opera company that revived this opera in 2004 to mark the occasion of the theater's reopening after a 2-year renovation. Together with Diana Damrau's extraordinary talent in the star role, they showed just how stunning Salieri's works can be when played as they were meant to be.