OPERA AND ORATORIO A. SCARLATTI: Griselda Roschmann, Cangemi, Fink, Tro Santafe; Zazzo, van Rensburg; Akademie fur alte Musik Berlin, Jacobs. Libretto and translations. Harmonia Mundi HMC 901805.07 (3) Boccaccio's Decameron provided librettist Apostolo Zeno with his inspiration for the tale of Griselda, a...

SCARLATTI: Sedecia, Re di Gerusalemme * Perez, Capici, Frisani; Cecchetti, Vinco; Alessandro Stradella Consort, Velardi. Text and translations. Bongiovanni GB 2278/79-2 (Qualiton, dist.) In the first years of eighteenth-century Rome it was a crime to produce opera; papal edict forbade it for...

Is there really any point in deploring Robert Ludlum, whose nine novels might as well be called "The Ludlum Formula," instead of "The Scarlatti Inheritance," "The Matarese Circle," and so forth? Should we wail that his violence is excessive, not to say downright implausible? Should we object that his sex scenes are curiously chaste for a writer who seems to be so obsessed with physical contact? Or that his plot developments aren't so much plot developments as...

It's hard to believe that novels like [The Scarlatti Inheritance] are still appearing in 1971. But maybe you've been longing for a revival of those Lanny Budd goulashes, in which historical figures rub elbow-patches with fictional creations, all of them in the process being rendered not a little incredible: Cordell Hull ("this good and honest old man"), Hess ("darkly cherubic"), Ludendorff, Goebbels ("this unattractive little man"), Hitler ("som...