ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK (1854-1921)

Hansel and Gretel

 

Rebecca Evans (soprano)  

Jennifer Larmore (mezzo-soprano)  

Jane Henschel (mezzo-soprano)

 Rosalind Plowright (mezzo-soprano)  

Robert Hayward (baritone)  

Sarah Tynan (soprano)

Diana Montague (mezzo-soprano)  

 

New London Children’s Choir, Philharmonia Orchestra / Sir Charles Mackerras

 

An all-star cast performs Humperdinck’s most famous opera, Hansel and Gretel, in English. It is sometimes asked whether Hansel and Gretel is really an opera for children or an opera for adults. The answer, of course, is that it is for both. Children will enjoy its straightforward songs and singing games, its rampaging comic-grotesque witch with her monstrous eating habits, and its supernatural apparitions. But then the child in us all probably enjoys this!

 

It is a bitter-sweet fairytale of threatened innocence and vanquished evil, written with a delicious mixture of folkmelodies and Wagnerian techniques. In addition, adults will probably relish Humperdinck’s rich orchestration and subtle harmony, his consistently strong melodic invention and his masterly counterpoint, and his amazing variety of mood and texture. It is an opera for everybody.

 

The recording brings together three wonderful singers who first performed this opera together at the 2004 BBC Proms to high acclaim. Jennifer Larmore reprises her role, in English, of Hansel (a role she has previously recorded in the German language) with Rebecca Evan as Gretel and Jane Henschel as the Witch. They are conducted this time by Sir Charles Mackerras who brings his own remarkable magic touch to the proceedings. Truly a gingerbread confection of a recording, involving some of opera’s brightest stars, and demonstrating why this opera is a permanent presence in the operatic repertoire.

 

…It was Rebecca Evans’s Gretel, who took the honours. Spinning out radiant lines of delicious purity, she made it hard to see how the role could be sung better…

The Times

 

Drawing on her long CV of menacing roles, Henschel’s witch was the complete package… only the hardened purists could have resisted her charms.

The Times

 

The Grimm Brothers would have loved it.

 

The New York Times on Jennifer Larmore in the Met’s production of Hansel and Gretel

 

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