After 25 years I finished my career as an opera singer, which had started in Basel, Switzerland, and taken me to the world’s foremost opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, Bayreuther Festspiele, Barcelona, Paris, London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, the Vienna State Opera etc. Then I founded a record company called MELODRAM whose aim was to preserve unforgettable live recordings of my great colleagues for posterity. Many opera lovers around the world had asked me if there would be any possibility to make such unique events available on record, and so I used my connections around the world and started releasing such recordings, first on LP and later on CD.
Of course, the sound quality of such recordings is very variable and has to be polished to come as near as possible to the special acoustic conditions of the respective theatre where the performance was given. Never can a live recording be compared to the perfect but in many cases lifeless and even sterile sound a studio recording is usually offering. A live recording should give the impression of the almost feverish sensations before and during a performance, so difficult to describe. Great artists are living their parts and are often in an almost transcendental state, never recreated in a recording studio.
With this ambition I have built a catalogue of great live performances now available on the label GOLDEN MELODRAM. These recordings are distributed on all 5 continents and my ambition for the future is to enlarge the catalogue with many more releases of our rich musical heritage to make future generations able to discover the Golden Age of great performances.
