With his first Tragédie lyrique Andromaque (1780), Gretry broke unwritten laws of the French music theatre of his time: he had set to music a tragedy by the pillar saint Racine and departed far too far from Gluck's works, which were perceived as the norm. The piece promptly failed, which was not due to Grétry's music, on the contrary: his "fresh cell treatment" with elements of the Opéra comique is perceived today as an enrichment. Hervé Niquet succeeds here not only in supplementing our image of French opera, but in enriching it with a genuine masterpiece.

Thanks to the overwhelming success of his tenth opera L’italiana in Algeri (1813), the 21-year-old Gioachino Rossini definitively conquered the world stage as the greatest comic opera composer of his time. With this opera, which – in the eyes of Stendhal – “makes you forget all the miseries of the world”, Rossini created a blueprint for his greatest successes. The style showcased in L’italiana is a consummation of eighteenth-century traditions as well as an inspiration for later, Romantic developments, and the humorous events in the story entertain us until this very day. With this live recording made at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in February 2022, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century once again shows its capacity for renewal while respecting its venerable past, which will always be linked to the late Frans Brüggen. With a splendid cast of soloists including Vasilisa Berzhanskaya, Ricardo Seguel, Alasdair Kent and Pablo Ruiz, the fine collaboration with La Cetra Vokalensemble Basel and the exquisite conducting of maestro Giancarlo Andretta, this sparkling project will for sure make it into the shelves (and hearts) of many music lovers.

Who doesn't like the ciaccona, ciacona or chaconne - the exuberant dance in which the upper voices fantasize over a bass scheme, imitating and inspiring each other? The ciaconna, which may have come to Spain from South America, quickly spread throughout Europe and even found its way into popular music. Leila Shayegh and her musician friends from La Centifolia play a whole round of chaconnas, some famous, some unknown, by Bertali, Purcell, Schmelzer Matteis, Corelli or anonymous composers from the famous collection from the "Schrank no. 2" in Dresden. The climax and conclusion is the famous "Canon" (with "Gigue", which is usually neglected) by Johann Pachelbel, played with a liveliness and transparency that is rarely heard in this frequently played piece!

The young Swiss soprano Marie Lys was pleasantly surprised to discover that many of the roles she has sung in George Frideric Handel's works in recent years were written for the spectacularly virtuoso soprano Anna Maria Strada, Handel's prima donna in 1730s London. Accompanied by the Abchordis Ensemble and Andrea Buccarella, the group's conductor and harpsichordist, Marie Lys decided to dedicate her first solo album on Glossa to "La Stradina", with an in-depth study of Anna Maria's life on stage and the extraordinary vocal skills her roles demanded.

Lys has selected a repertoire that traces the career of this unique soprano in a representative way: The musical journey begins in Venice with Vivaldi's "La verità in cimento" from 1720, leads via Naples with arias from operas by Domenico Sarro, Leonardo Leo and Leonardo Vinci to London with three arias from Handel's operas Lotario, Alcina and Arminio. After a successful decade in London, she returned to the Italian stages in 1738, where she rounded off her career with performances in Naples and Turin in operas by Ristori, Porpora and Galuppi. New roles and operatic music thought lost come to light on this recording. A fine example is the music from Popora's Tiridate, from which this album takes its title "Amate Stelle".

Emilio Moreno’s passion, knowledge and thirst for the music of Luigi Boccherini yields a further revelation with the Six Symphonies, op.35, premiered in 1782, newly edited by violist Moreno and performed here by the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century. In 1981, Frans Brüggen, Lucy van Dael and friends founded the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, consisting of fifty members from twenty different countries. Six or more times a year the orchestra assembles to go on tour. The musicians, all specialists in eighteenth and early nineteenth century music, play on period instruments or on contemporary copies. The wide-ranging repertoire this orchestra performs includes works by Purcell, Bach, Rameau, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Chopin, and has been recorded for Philips Classics and nowadays for The Grand Tour / Glossa. In August 2014, the Orchestra had to say farewell to Brüggen. While the collaboration between the orchestra and its founding father came to an end with his death, Brüggen’s inspiration remains and will guide the Orchestra for years to come. The Orchestra continues the tradition of six or more projects a year, now by inviting guests and guest conductors to lead.

In recent decades, the music of Spanish composer José de Nebra (1702-1768) has enjoyed its well-deserved renaissance, and time and again one is amazed at the melodic inventiveness and dramatic power of his works. Alberto Miguélez Rouco and his ensemble Los Elementos present here the zarzuela Donde hay violencia, no hay culpa ("Where there is violence, there is no guilt"), first performed in 1744, which treats the story of the rape of the virtuous Roman woman Lucretia, the founding myth of the Roman Republic, as handed down by Livius.

Amply demonstrating that Charles-Hubert Gervais didn’t just excel in composing operas, György Vashegyi turns his attention to the French Baroque composer’s sacred music, with a new disc of “Grands Motets” containing five extended and sumptuous psalms and hymns, involving soloists, chorus and orchestra. Gervais’ relative modern-day anonymity in this genre can to a large extent be placed at the door of historical circumstance: during the end of the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV he was employed by the king’s younger brother Philippe d’Orléans and continued so during d’Orléans’ Regency and it wasn’t until 1723 that Gervais obtained an official post as one of the four sous-maîtres of the Chapelle du Roi. And then any motet he wrote went straight into the royal library without publication and has required today’s transcribers to create performing editions.

Tones of celebration, relief (on Louis XV’s recovery from a nasty illness), solemnity, meditation, a dash of restrained theatricality, bold harmonies and lighter orchestral textures than with Lalande (or Bernier and Campra) provide Vashegyi’s Purcell Choir and Orfeo Orchestra with plenty of scope to demonstrate their collective mastery and experience of the idiom, and they are more than ably assisted by the solo contributions of Olivia Doray, Katalin Szutrély, Cyrille Dubois, Mathias Vidal and David Witczak.

The Serenata a 3, RV 690, is the least familiar and in certain respects the most enigmatic of the Vivaldi serenatas. The sole surviving source is the autograph manuscript of the score, preserved at the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria of Turin. Many of the questions surrounding the origin of Vivaldi’s score remain unresolved. When and where was the serenata composed? Which patron hosted it? On what occasion did it receive its premiere? Vivaldi expert Federico Maria Sardelli performed the rarely heard work at the Barga Opera Festival 2021 and subsequently realized the present recording.

Between 1769 and 1773, Mozart made three travels to Italy, under the guidance of his father Leopold. The present program traces the stages especially of his first two trip from 1769 to 1771, during which the young Mozart played an important role in Milan's musical life, and reconstructs the most important musical encounters. Arias from "Mitridate" and "Ascanio in Alba" (written for the Teatro Regio Ducale Milan) and "Betulia Liberata" (written for Padua) can be heard. The program is rounded off by the musical background that Mozart found on the peninsula, illustrated by arias from operas by Guglielmi, Myslivecek and Gluck - all representatives of a style and a search for language that was precisely the reason why the "Viaggio in Italia" was an essential stage in the training of a young composer.

Luciano Contini provides ample evidence of the Italian lute tradition flourishing well into the Baroque era with his recording of the Sonate d’intavolatura di leuto (1718) by Giovanni Zamboni, which now makes a welcome return to the catalogue. His music calls to mind the influence of Corelli and Weiss as much as it does that of Piccinini. Contini, an ensemble player with many leading groups – is here a virtuoso soloist on the archlute, an admirable advocate for a neglected composer.

Giaches de Wert, a Flemish composer linked to the courts of Mantua and Ferrara, paved the way for the innovations in madrigalistic writing, that seconda prattica which became associated with Monteverdi. This recording features some of his later madrigalistic compositions, on texts of Torquato Tasso's Gierusalemme liberata and Battista Guarini's Il pastor fido. The historical La Venexiana singers deliver their best for this milestone interpretaiton of a lesser known repertory.

A contemporary of Mozart, Johann Christoph Vogel also died at an early age. Forward looking in approach, this composer of a tormented disposition, sought to extend the operatic revolution undertaken by Gluck in the 1770s. First performed in 1786 at the Opéra de Paris, La Toison d'or reveals that search for an expressive art which demanded an all-embracing involvement from the performers and supplied the music with a sometimes unbearable intensity for audiences of the time. The heroine Médée allows her despair to break out with the same emphasis as in the later representation of the character by Cherubini in 1797. It is no wonder that Berlioz considered Vogel as one of the pioneers of French Romanticism. After recent successes obtained by their recordings devoted to the sacred music which is so close to them (Bouteiller, Striggio, Le Prince), Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel return to another of their great specialities, the tragédie lyrique, with a new large-scale operatic recovery. Marie Kalinine, Judith Van Wanroij and Jean-Sébastien Bou embody to perfection those mythological figures so dear to French 18th century audiences. This opera will definitely surprise modern-day listeners by its clear Germanic influence which arises, ultimately, from the composer's nationality.

A vivid demonstration of how widely Fabio Biondi’s musical imagination runs comes with his new recording of Giuseppe Verdi’s work of genius, Macbeth, issued on Glossa. It is the original Florentine 1847 version of the work, shorn of the Paris revisions more typically found on record, which Fabio Biondi has opted to conduct, the director believing in its greater dramatic and stylistic coherence. Verdi was of the opinion that the Shakespearean tragedy was “one of the greatest creations of the human spirit” and set himself the task of rendering the fire of its drama into music during and following a period when his physical health had broken down. With its scenes of murder, battle and sleep-walking, brindisi and witches’ choruses all creating a somber atmosphere drenched with paranoia and a lust for power, the dramatic flow of the opera places vast demands on the soloists, notably upon the unhappy title-role couple. Fabio Biondi’s version comes with baritone Giovanni Meoni, a leading Verdi specialist as Macbeth whilst the larger-than-life role of Lady Macbeth is taken by a noted present-day Salome, Médée (and Medea), the soprano Nadja Michael. Bass Fabrizio Beggi assumes the part of Banquo, both when alive and as a ghost. Important also in the work is the chorus, a leading protagonist for the composer, and here the Podlasie Opera and Philharmonic Choir. Critical also is Verdi’s orchestral writing for Macbeth, introducing rare and radical tonal colorings and Fabio Biondi, directing his Europa Galante from the violin, is just the radical, challenging musical spirit to breathe new life into Verdi’s masterpiece and its search for dramatic truth.

For his latest Glossa release with Graindelavoix, Björn Schmelzer takes his lead from the funeral rites for the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens in 1640 – which might well have encompassed the Requiem Mass by Orazio Vecchi as recorded here – to demonstrate the coexistence in Baroque Antwerp of two apparently contradictory, but interconnected facets. One of these facets was the continuing presence of prima prattica polyphony; the city was a major centre for music printing and Vecchi’s Requiem was brought out there – as were works by other composers represented on this disc: George de La Hèle, Duarte Lobo and Pedro Ruimonte (the recording ends with three successive Agnus Deis!). The other facet is that of the image of Rubens’s art: full of energy, seductive, optimistic and scintillating. The Northern Baroque par excellence. With his recording, Schmelzer encourages the listener to enter into this strange world of artistic clashes and ruptures – not least the fact that Vecchi, a composer better known for his secular music popular in Venice, would have had his stile antico sacred music performed in Antwerp. This is achieved with Graindelavoix’s customary uncompromising – and clearly provocative – vocal sound, complete with both artfully-executed ornamentations and attention to ensemble needs.

Classical Music