After nearly two years in which record companies were seriously compromised in what they could record, whether live or in the studio, things began to get back to normal in 2022. Whether the shifts in genres and repertoire – away from studio recordings of large-scale orchestral and operatic works and towards releases derived from live performances – were part of a gradual change in emphasis that had set in before the pandemic, though, or a direct consequence of it, was hard to determine.
Certainly the cost of embarking on studio-made recordings of complete operas now looks likely to ensure such projects become permanent rarities. Instead, their places are being mostly filled by CDs and DVDs derived from staged and concert performances, sometimes directly warts and all, sometimes with discreet patching after the event. René Jacobs’s typically quirky account of Weber’s Der Freischütz was an exception to that rule, but in the longer term it looks likely that it will mainly be baroque operas with their smaller casts and orchestral forces that get bespoke studio treatment. There were fine examples of these this year with recordings of Handel’s Amadigi from Christian Curnyn’s Early Opera Company and the rarely performed 1749 score of Rameau’s Zoroastre from Alexis Kossenko and Les Ambassadeurs – La Grande Écurie.
