Recess! Media

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That’s the soprano Lambroula Maria Pappas, singing one of the famous arias from Verdi’s Rigoletto, on a CD called The World’s Very Best Opera for Kids. The recording is from The Children’s Group of Canada, which has been doing wonderful classical music compilations for young people for a number of years. Many of us can probably trace our love of opera to hearing the Saturday Met broadcasts around the house. But the tough part, at least for me, was always the wait — and if it was Wagner it was a long, long wait — to hear the great stuff, like this, come thundering through the radio speaker, from Valhalla all the way to Chicago.

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With a CD like this, though, you and your children can try out different flavors of operas and composers to find out which one most appeals to your tastes — Mozart, Bizet, Rossini, Pucini, Handel, Offenbach….. The text for each of the 14 arias here are included in English, so that you can sing along with Papageno or Xerxes or Mimi. And once you’ve mastered the words, you can go to the karaoke section at the end and do your very own Figaro:

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