Toughest Penance Franck's 'Stradella' - reviewed by ROBERT ANDERSON '... the staging did its best to eliminate the music altogether ...'

A new opera by César Franck is astonishment enough, but that he probably wrote most of it before the age of twenty is wonder indeed. He didn't quite finish it, and only hinted at most of the scoring, which has been provided to great effect by Luc van Hove. So far so good, and all credit to the Walloons of Liège for mounting it. Alessandro Stradella was an Italian composer of the mid-seventeenth century, who happened to spend some of his life in Venice and was finally bumped off in Genoa to the accompaniment of twenty-four masses for his soul...

CESAR FRANCK

DYNAMIC SRL

BELGIUM