Dvořák: The Spectre’s Bride CD review – choral music takes a wild nocturnal ride

Šaturová/Breslik/Plachetka/Wiener Singakademie/ORF Vienna SO/Meister
(Capriccio) There could be the dramatic skeleton of an opera lurking beneath the cantata veneer of The Spectre’s Bride, Dvořák’s choral work which was commissioned for the 1885 Birmingham festival but first tried out in the Bohemian city of Pilsen a few months earlier. Based on a poem by Karel Jaromír Erben, about a young girl who is abducted by a ghost she believes to be the spirit