On the dark side of fame awaits the slide into obscurity. That’s certainly true for a number of operas that, while popular and highly lucrative during their composers’ lifetimes, soon followed their creators into the shadowy realm of oblivion. Operas, for example, that only ever get mentioned in connection with some much more famous sibling. Giuseppe Gazzaniga’s Don Giovanni (Discs 1 & 2) – premiered half a year before Mozart’s masterpiece – is such an example, as is Ruggero Leoncavallo’s La Bohème (Discs 9 & 10) and George Bizet’s Djamileh (Disc 3), widely considered the predecessor of Carmen. Other operas simply fail to achieve the same profile as other works by a composer – Jules Massenet’s operas, for example, are hardly a footnote of music history, but his opera Thérèse (Disc 8) remains a forgotten work. Two examples of works that are scarcely performed or even known outside of what is now the Czech Republic are also included in this collection of Opera Rarities on ORFEO: Dvořák’s last opera Armida (Discs 4 & 5) and Zdeněk Fibich’s Šárka (Discs 6 & 7).

Contents:

Gazzaniga - Don Giovanni o sia Il convitato di Pietra (1787)
- John Aler • Eva Steinsky • Pamela Coburn
- Münchner Rundfunkorchester / Stefan Soltész

Bizet - Djamileh (1872)
- Lucia Popp • Franco Bonisolli
- Münchner Rundfunkorchester / Lamberto Gardelli

Dvořák - Armida (1904)
- Joanna Borowska • Pavel Daniluk • Wiesław Ochman
- Czech Philharmonic Orchestra / Gerd Albrecht

Fibich - Šárka (1897)
- Eva Urbanová • Dalibor Jenis • Janez Lotrič
- ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien / Sylvain Cambreling

Massenet - Thérèse (1907)
- Agnes Baltsa • Francisco Araiza
- Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma della RAI Gerd Albrecht

Leoncavallo - La Bohème (1897)
- Franco Bonisolli • Lucia Popp • Bernd Weikl
- Münchner Rundfunkorchester / Heinz Wallberg

Recordings: 1981-1998