Romantic Offenbach Vol. 1

(Boosey & Hawkes Voice). Jacques Offenbach's more than 100 stage works are an endless treasure trove of vocal highlights with highly different musical moods and lyrical themes. To mark the 200th birthday of the great composer in 2019, which is at the same time the year of the 20th anniversary of the Offenbach Edition Keck OEK, the editor and Offenbach expert Jean-Christophe Keck has assembled a selection of arias. The four-part collection arranged according to voice category shows a rather unknown, romantic side of Offenbach. Apart from rediscovered works and first editions, however, the collection is not complete without some of his unrivalled hits. This volume shows that the composer especially liked to entrust the tenors with tender, sentimental numbers. But the melancholy is not always as genuine as that of the involuntary jester from the opera comique of the same name (here represented by the well-known Ballad to the Moon): Characters like Pluto, Paris or Robinson Crusoe know how to use their melodious voices with quite some ulteriormotive to achieve their goal. The character Frantz, traumatized by war, from the grand opera Les Fees du Rhin, however, is one of Offenbach's few deeply tragic figures. Romantic Offenbach is aimed at fully trained and budding professionals as well as at Offenbach fans of every shade and colour, providing repertoire pieces for recitals, studies or private music-making.