Staatskapelle Weimar & Kirill Karabits - Liszt: Sardanapalo & Mazeppa (2019) [Hi-Res]

Double premiere – first recording and first performance: Franz Liszt never finished his mature opera Sardanapalo. Now 170 years old, the first act refracts the world of mid 19th-century opera through the prism of Liszt’s unmistakable voice. Kirill Karabits directs Liszt’s own orchestra in Weimar, where the music was composed, in a programme of burning, Byronic romanticism.

Contrary heroes: Mazeppa and Sardanapalo performed by Karabits and the Weimar Staatskapelle

Sardanapalo, who prefers wine and concubines to politics and warfare, and Mazeppa, who dies with glory, having endured pain and humiliation: dramatic literary models, impressively set to music by Franz Liszt. Written at the same time, these works represent Liszt's ideas striving to unite literature and music, on the one hand modernising Italian opera and on the other advancing towards the symphonic poem in his orchestral writing.

The Sardanapalo manuscript comprises the first act. For 170 years the material lay dormant in the Goethe and Schiller archive in Weimar: it was only in 2017 that David Trippett deciphered, edited and orchestrated the manuscript at the University of Cambridge.

Kirill Karabits conducts the Weimar Staatskapelle: Liszt's orchestra in the city in which he composed the opera. audite continues its series of the great Weimar Kapellmeister-composers.

"It is indeed extraordinary… Liszt’s fluid treatment of bel canto structures reveals an assured musical dramatist at work… He makes no concessions to his singers, though, and his vocal writing is taxing in the extreme… The choral singing is consistently strong, the playing terrific, and Karabits conducts with extraordinary passion. Trippett has carefully modelled his orchestration on Liszt’s works of the early 1850s, and it sounds unquestionably authentic." (Graamophone)

Joyce El-Khoury, soprano
Airam Hernandez, tenor
Oleksandr Pushniak, bass-baritone
Opernchor des Deutschen Nationaltheaters Weimar
Staatskapelle Weimar
Kirill Karabits, conductor