Various Artists - Opera For Everyone
Opera has an unenviable reputation. The conventional wisdom with most music lovers and historians is that Opera combines music and theater into the ultimate art form. Yet many people see opera as stuffy, artificial and just plain boring. Opera can be one of the most satisfactory of entertainments but admittedly it takes a little work to understand and appreciate.
Stanford University’s web site Opera Glass and Naxos Records have combined to make freely available a 4 CD set called Opera For Everyone. Narrated by Ira Ross, the set offers four operas; Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Verdi’s La Traviata, Bizet’s Carmen, and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Mr. Ross describes both plot and music as musical highlights are presented in excerpts. While you are not getting the entire work, this is an excellent way to be introduced to these masterpieces. Even I, being thoroughly familar with these works, found these albums to be very entertaining. The set comes with a downloadable teaching manual that lists the performers, tracks, and gives much information on the operas.
The albums are available using 56kbps for spoken narration tracks and 128kbps for the musical tracks. It’s an interesting choice, lowering the download size yet keeping the music in decent quality sound. Don’t forget to download the teaching manual!
128k sucks. Please start doing 192k rips so we can really hear these.
Comment by Foo Barr — March 3, 2006 @ 9:43 pm
I don’t rip these. I only link to the sites that carry these albums so I’m afraid we’re stuck with whatever bit-rate the artist or label chooses. If it’s any consolation, I make it a general rule not to link to anything less than 128kbps with a few exceptions. Personally, I think 128kbps is quite listenable although I prefer at least 160. Of course, the higher quality the better.
Comment by freealbums — March 3, 2006 @ 10:27 pm