Pretty much everybody, in my opinion, knows four Opera pieces:
Kill the Wabbit! Rabbit of Seville and other selections from the Barber of Seville as performed in “Long-haired Hare”. The Singing Orange, ie: Carmen as performed on Sesame Street (showing my age on this one). The Diva’s Opera from the Fifth Element, aka: Lucia di Lammermoor
I’m terribly impressed by the Diva’s Opera. The voice of the singer is frankly beautiful and the piece is itself very pretty. Even sung in Eye-Tal-Yan, I can enjoy this piece just because it’s very beautiful and sung by a beatiful voice.
So, my question to your opera-enabled dopers is simply, where can I find more of this?
By “This”, I mean, cherry-pick for me beautiful individual pieces from operas that I might enjoy without listening to the broader, usually more boring, IMO, opera itself.
Has anybody already done this in a nice single CD collection that I could just purchase?
There are plenty of “Opera’s Greatest Hits”-type collections. Search for “opera” under classical music at Amazon.com for a place to start.
Here is one example. I don’t own this, but it looks like a nice mix, from Baroque (Handel and Purcell) to 20th century (Stravinsky and Britten), performed by some great singers and conductors. You can even listen to samples of most of the tracks.
Check out **Aria**. 10 different directors, 10 different stylistic interpretations of 10 different operatic pieces (covering a range of eras, languages, etc.). A bit hit & miss, but if you get bored, there’s a generous amount of female nudity to pass the time.
Sorry, I noticed you asked for CDs, and the soundtrack for the film I mentioned is OOP. However, this will cover some familiar ground, encompassing familiar pieces from films you’ve no doubt seen (Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, A Room with a View, etc.) A friendly intro for the Operaphobic.
Nessun Dorma from Puccini’s Turandot and O souverain, o juge o pere from Le Cid by Massenet are two of my favorites. They are absolutely beautiful arias for tenor voice.
You might want to check out the Three Tenors albums for a nice variety of pieces, both the 1998 and the 2004 are worth having.
“Der Hölle Rache” from Mozart’s Magic Flute is probably another one that most people can recognize by ear. We sent it into space on a record, I believe. It’s popularly known as the Queen of the Night aria, and is the one with all the stratospheric "ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ahhhhhhh!"s