Italian label IDIS, or "Istituto Discografico Italiano," combines in its Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Médée. Boulanger two sets of pioneering Baroque music recordings by renowned pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, her abridged 1952 recording of Charpentier's opera Médée, and a selection of Monteverdi madrigals recorded in 1937. It is a full-price disc, and apparently there is no attempt to undercut the competition, as this is heralded as the "World Première on CD" (sic) for the sake of Médée. It is, by virtue of IDIS getting this out a little ahead of French EMI's Les Introuvables des Nadia Boulanger. Holding out for the EMI set will win you Boulanger's previously unreleased account of Johann Sebastian Bach's Cantata No. 4, "Christ lag in Todesbanden," and the album of Rameau extracts that she made at about the same time as Médée. The Monteverdi madrigals featured here as filler have already been reissued in several different forms, perhaps in none better than Cascavelle's Hommage á Nadia Boulanger: Enrégistrements 1930-1949, which includes all of her 78 rpm-era recordings.
There are plenty of reasons to want this material apart from the obvious notion that Boulanger is who she is, and that these are some of the oldest recordings of Baroque music that attempt a kind of period performance style. In the latter respect, they are not very successful by current-day standards, as practically all of these pieces are played on modern instruments and are arranged to some degree -- though there is a certain campy charm to hearing Zefiro Torna sung by reedy French baritones and accompanied with a piano. The main benefit of having Boulanger's Médée on disc is that it affords a rare recorded glimpse of soprano Irma Kolassi, Maria Callas' teacher, in the title role, in addition to a splendid outing by bass baritone and Boulanger Ensemble regular Doda Conrad in the role of Créon. But don't waste your money on this IDIS release, which suffers from audio artifacts, cramped sound, and uneven pitching in the Médée; the "Introuvables" is the way to go.
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