Melba Recordings

"... a label of fragrant distinction"

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News from Melba Recordings

Go behind the scenes for insights on our recordings, our artists and our future plans. Follow our artists' schedules and share the excitement of their journeys.

29/09/2008
During the 1880s, it was fashionable to go to the concerts on Sunday afternoon in Paris, a fact that must have urged Saint-Saëns to compose Nuit Persane. He had composed in 1870 a collection of six melodies for voice and piano taken from a...
29/09/2008
The cantata Nuit Persane is one of Saint-Saëns’ numerous exercises in exotisme, and comes from the pen of a confirmed orientalist who, since 1873, had been a frequent visitor to Algeria and had always maintained more than a passing interest in...
29/09/2008
It was a mistake for Peleus and Thetis not to have invited the goddess Discordia to their wedding. But she came anyway, throwing a golden apple, inscribed with the words ‘to the Fairest’, among the other divinities present. When Hera, Aphrodite...
29/09/2008
It was due to a chance encounter in front of the Grand Hotel, located near the Paris Opera with the Director of the Théâtre de Monte Carlo, during the summer of 1902 that Saint-Saëns wrote his opera Hélène. Raoul Gunsbourg offered to commission a...
30/08/2008
"A lot people know what the Sydney Opera House looks like but not many know what goes on inside it,"says Maria Vandamme, founder of the Melba Foundation and Melba Recordings. The redoubtable campaigner, who trained as a pianist and became a...
4/08/2008
This is a conversation with conductor Guillaume Tourniaire on his return from the Macerata Festival (Italy), where he oversaw the first production of Marco Turino’s opera based on The Servant by Robin Maugham (July 2008). He talks about the score he...
24/07/2008
Transcript of Interview: TERRY LANE: Is a night on the stage as Brünnhilde a day’s good work? Lisa Gasteen: Yes. If I’m in the first act of anything I like to get in two hours before curtain up. In the Götterdämmerung because I’m in the prologue,...
1/03/2008
Musical Magic of Persian and Greek Nights Young French chief conductor Guillaume Tourniaire has brought back concerts onto the stage of State Opera Prague, and has done it in remarkable quality of both dramaturgy and interpretation. In autumn he...
1/03/2008
The French in Prague To go to Prague to the auditorium of the New German Theatre, opened 120 ago, to listen to two works by a renowned French composer, which had been forgotten for a hundred years and which have for the first time been recorded...
29/02/2008
Conductor Richard Bonynge keeps a schedule that would challenge a man half his age. The 77-year-old trots the globe conducting opera and ballet, makes records and undertakes scholarships. Though based in Switzerland, the Sydney-born conductor...