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 Boheme (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 Thérese (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: Dvo ák’s last opera Armida (Discs 4 & 5) and Zden k Fibich’s Šárka (Discs 6 & 7).

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Recordings: 1981-1998.