CLOR is an Indexed Electronic Catalogue (IEC) in which it is intended to list all recordings that are or have been commercially available of "complete" operas or of extended excerpts of operas longer than about 20 minutes, i.e. as long or longer than one LP-side. Audio and video recordings are included and the term "opera" is taken to include operettas, opéra-bouffes, G&S, zarzuelas and a few musicals as well as works normally described as operas. Although more than 14,000 recordings of over 3100 operas are listed in CLOR it is far from being complete and, of course, never will be.
All the software is purpose-written, so the search-engine is completely integrated with the catalogue, and thus there should be no "false-hits"
The following information about each recording is included, when known, title, composer, year of first performance, date of recording, orchestra, chorus, language of performance, singers and the roles they perform, catalogue numbers and the years of issue in the various formats, and references to reviews in the main Western European languages.
There are composer, title, conductor, singer, and singer-with-singer indexes by which information can be retrieved by the use of three-letter codes (the first three letters of the name or title), as well as two "browse modes" in which composers and titles are listed alphabetically. In addition, the user is presented with a series of "ordered lists". Thus, the recordings on file in which a particular singer appears may be listed in alphabetical or inverse alphabetical order of composer, title, or conductor, or in order or inverse order of the year of the recording. Also, the recordings in which the singer appears with any other singer may be listed similarly. In this way the user gets an overall view of what recordings are on file before opening the file for any particular recording. In addition to the indexes there is a general search facility which will search the whole catalogue for the occurrence of any string of characters. This may be refined by carrying out further searches based on the principles of Boolean logic.
CLOR will print many of the lists and documents that it displays on the screen provided that WORDPAD or NOTEPAD is installed on the user's computer. It is also possible to send these lists and documents to wordpad as an ANSI-encoded text file so that the user can edit them and save them in another format with a name of his or her choice. Many of the lists and documents that CLOR produces may be converted into HTML-format. Thus, it will produce opera, conductor and singer "discographies" in HTML. The "discographies" on this website are examples.
If you are interested in Opera "Discographies" you may also find Carlo Marinelli's "Opera Discography Encylopaedia" (ODE) http://www.carlomarinelli.it and the discography in the Opera Data Base (ODB) http://operadatabase.com of interest or if you prefer the printed page try "Recent International Opera Discography" Vol.23; published by the Edwin Mellen Press http://www.mellenpress.com
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clor.clor@ntlworld.com - to contact the compiler, Brian Capon, and to report errors and omissions.