Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opéra-ballet Les Fêtes d’Hébé gains a stirring and bright-colored new recording from a starry line-up of soloists, György Vashegyi, his Purcell Choir and Orfeo Orchestra. Though first performed at the end of the 1730s – between the two tragédies of Castor et Pollux and Dardanus – this work has received much less modern recognition for its qualities than either of the other two, although it had a substantial success with its first run of over 70 performances; an entertainment mixing delight and longing, underpinned by Rameau’s coloristic and sophisticated orchestration and coupled with his supremely inspired pastoral writing. Now, with a new edition prepared by Pascal Denécheau (who also writes the booklet essay here),this new production presents modern-day stars of the French Baroque in Chantal Santon Jeffery, Olivia Doray, Judith van Wanroij, Reinoud Van Mechelen, Mathias Vidal and David Witczak, all relishing a libretto (peopled by characters from mythology and the Ancient World) which aims at celebrating the artistic aptitudes to be found on the stage of the Opéra in Paris: Poetry, Music and Dance (from which derives the opera’s subtitle of “Les Talents lyriques”).This new recording presents the June 1739 version of this opéra ballet (whilst embracing changes made in revivals from across subsequent decades), and additionally includes the original version of the second entrée, “La Musique”.

The two central Marys of Christian belief and their great love for Jesus form the theme of All'amore immenso: Mary, the Mother of God, and Mary Magdalene, the sinner who stands with her at the cross, meeting the Risen Lord at His tomb. While Mary, Mother of God already found great veneration in the Middle Ages, the figure of Mary Magdalene received special attention in numerous oratorios in 17th and 18th century Italy. There, the role of Mary Magdalene moves into the field of tension between earthly and heavenly love and thus offers wonderful material for highly emotional music.

Massimo Mazzeo, director of the Divino Sospiro ensemble, has made a wonderful selection of arias from oratorios and combined them with three Salve Regina settings - the compositions are by Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti, Bononcini, Caldara, Porpora and Leo. The soloist of the recording is the Italian mezzo-soprano Josè Maria Lo Monaco, who is a regular guest at the great opera houses as a baroque and especially bel canto specialist. All'amore immenso is her debut solo release.

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber is the most dazzling figure among the violin virtuosos of the 17th century, comparable to a Paganini in the 19th, even though Biber did not travel around and spent most of his life permanently employed as a musical director (Kapellmeister) in Salzburg. Biber's pieces are bursting with virtuoso elements, new techniques, bizarreness and endless ingenuity - the 'fantastic style' (stylus phantasticus) at the height of the age. His collection of violin sonatas, printed in Nuremberg in 1681, became a standard work and spread throughout Europe.

Lina Tur Bonet has selected four of the eight sonatas for solo violin with basso continuo and added a parthia for two violas d'amore. A Spanish violinist, Tur Bonet is a pronounced specialist for virtuoso music of the early Baroque and has already recorded several albums with her ensemble Musica Alchemica on the Pan Classics label. Her complete recording of Biber's Rosary Sonatas was celebrated by critics and audiences alike, and she received the Diapason d'or in France for her album La Bellezza. Her two albums with Vivaldi concertos and sonatas also received great acclaim. This recording of Biber's violin sonatas constitutes her debut on the Glossa label.

Five years ago, Stile Galante dedicated a recording with the renowned Swedish mezzosoprano Ann Hallenberg to the celebrated soprano castrato Luigi Marchesi (1754-1829). Accompanied by soprano Francesca Cassinari, Stile Galante is now going back to this extraordinary musician and presents his work as a composer of chamber vocal music. Marchesi published during his stay in London two different collections of ariettas with fortepiano and harp accompaniment. The Ariette op. 1 & 2 are sweet musical cameos dominated by remarkable elegance. They perfectly embody the taste of the time and represent Marchesi’s wish to use his popularity as an opera singer to push in front of the audience a more all-round image of himself as an artist. The program is rounded off with brilliant instrumental pieces for fortepiano and harps by female composers Anne-Marie Krumpholz (1766-1824) and Veronika Rosalia Cianchettini (1769–1833) who worked with Marchesi in London.

What was the first composition ever written for solo violoncello? What was composed before Bach created his extraordinary suites for solo cello? These questions drove the cellist Josetxu Obregón to devote himself to the beginnings of solo literature for his instrument. These beginnings can be found in the city of Bologna, which, with its brilliant Capella Musicale and the Accademia Filarmonica, made a decisive contribution to the development of the violin and the cello. Obregon presents two ricercari by Domenico Gabrielli from 1688 as the first specific works for unaccompanied solo cello. Further stations on the way from Bologna to Cöthen to the climax of this genre with Bach's six suites are compositions by Vitali, Galli, de Ruvo, Dall' Abaco, Supriano and Colombi. Bach's works are also presented by Obregon, but in an unusual way: He takes a dance movement from each of Bach's suites and then places them - as a comparison of styles - between the works from his Italian anthology.

The only surviving version of Carlo Gesualdo’s First Book of Madrigals was printed in spring 1594 by the typographer Vincenzo Baldini. At the time, the composer was twenty-eight years old and had just left behind the murder of his wife, in 1590. In this first publication Gesualdo probably collected pieces composed earlier than 1591. The music is written by a young author, far away from the better-known experimental composer of later years, yet is clear and faultless, and often very effective. With this album, the members of La Compagnia del Madrigale complete the project which was initiated more than 20 years ago, by then under the name of La Venexiana: the recording of all six books of madrigals of Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, for Glossa. Thanks to their deep knowledge of the music and the poetry of the time, their beautiful voices and precise tuning, and their exquisite mastery in expressing the affetti contained in these pieces, they have definitely set a reference for this demanding repertoire.

The vihuelist Ariel Abramovich teams up with the legendary soprano María Cristina Kiehr and the rising star, tenor Jonatan Alvarado, in producing a very special view on Josquin Desprez, with transcriptions of some of the composer’s most significant works. Their procedure follows the tradition of the 16th-century authors that built up the vihuela repertoire (Fuenllana, Narváez,Pisador, etc.), often based on adaptations of the great polyphonic works of their time, in a unique approach that puts Josquin in an Iberian light. Finely recorded in Spain’s Tui Cathedral and containing a new essay by scholar John Griffiths, this production adds an exquisite jewel to the already rich treasure trove of Desprez recordings produced in 2021, the 5th centenary of his death, by various great labels – not the least Glossa’s two other contributions, by the ensembles Graindelavoix and Cantica Symphonia...

Mitzi Meyerson is a world-renowned American harpsichordist and teacher, based in Berlin for many decades now. She maintains a sterling reputation for her concerts and recordings, and has taught hundreds of students over the last thirty years, many of whom went on to be successful artists in their own right. She specializes in researching little-known or lost works for the harpsichord which she then brings to light in recordings. She has released over sixty albums to excellent critical acclaim. For the last 15 years she has been an exclusive Glossa recording artist, in a label that has worked with her in order to bring into the light, a solo or with small chamber ensembles, music by Balbastre, Muffat, Jones (Richard and John), Somis or Francœur.

György Vashegyi and his Orfeo Orchestra and Purcell Choir offer up a recording of Boismortier’s Les Voyages de l’Amour of which this 1736 opéra-ballet has been in sore need, a score long and unjustly neglected. For this latest dramatic extravaganza on Glossa, Chantal Santon Jeffery takes on the title role of lovesick Cupid, and the soprano is joined by two further widely experienced stars of the French Baroque opera revival in Katherine Watson (as the god of love’s sidekick and factotum Zéphire) and Judith van Wanroij as the shepherdess Daphné, smartly resistant to the god’s charms (until the end of the fourth act). By 1736, Joseph Bodin de Boismortier had become well-known in Parisian musical circles for his entertaining instrumental and vocal music and in his booklet essay Benoît Dratwicki (of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles) explains how this fashionable composer came to have his first production for the Paris Opéra cast into the shadows, how the roles for Cupid and Zéphire may have originally been written for two prominent dessus of the time but were replaced by male singers for the première and how this new recorded edition aims to provide a performance as the composer would have wanted it. Katia Velletaz, Éléonore Pancrazi and Thomas Dolié also contribute to this lively entertainment, with this release also containing two differing versions of the second act about the arrow-firing god of love’s travels through village, city and court in search of true love for himself.

Jean-Marie Leclair epitomized the idea of an eighteenth-century virtuoso-composer, one whose compositional output largely reflects his activity as a performer. Whilst the French school possessed precursors such as Jean-Féry Rebel, it is very much to Leclair that it owes its genuine development. The virtuoso violinist became a highly sought-after teacher, and a full generation of musicians were recipients of his teaching. Leclair published twelve concertos for violin in two sets, Op. 7 and Op. 10. The Op. 7 collection, of which four concertos have been included in this recording, is without doubt partially made up of works which Leclair performed at the Concert Spirituel between 1728 and 1736. Today, we are aware of the sytle employed by Leclair in his violin playing through his own writings and concert reviews from the time. His uncompromising ideal of performance is of a truly Appolonian nature: precision and integrity in execution, economy with the use of effects, accurate intonation and nobility of expression - all features brought to this new recording by Fabio Biondi and his already legendary ensemble, Europa Galante. The scholar Louis Castelain of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles provides the booklet notes.

One of the great composing figures from the French Baroque, Michel-Richard de Lalande is starting to receive his just dues through modern recordings, and Glossa is happy to unveil a new release featuring Olivier Schneebeli directing Les Pages et Les Chantres du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles in three of Lalande’s sumptuous grands motets. Very much a favored composer during the reign of Louis XIV, Lalande progressively assumed – from the1680s onwards – more and more of the principal court offices, and was called upon to provide sacred music for the Chapelle Royale within the Château de Versailles. Although the new chapel was not consecrated until 1710, the trio of grands motets recorded here will have been conceived of according to the chapel’s architectural and acoustical characteristics. Much detailed performing information from Lalande’s time is known today – including number of instrumental forces used and about the composer’s later revisions of his scores – and Venite, exultemus Domino, De profundis and Dominus regnavit all receive expressive and meticulously-prepared performances within the Chapelle Royale itself. To the quality of preparation of the CMBV maîtrise can be added the presence of a quartet of vocal soloists deeply experienced in the style of music from this time: Chantal Santon-Jeffery, Reinoud Van Mechelen, François Joron and Lisandro Abadie. Likewise, the contribution of Jana Semerádová’s Collegium Marianum provides exemplary instrumental support to Schneebeli’s direction in this new CMBV production.

Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613) is one of the most fascinating composers. It is hard to escape the temptation of seeing in his madrigals the tortured reflection of his psyche, beginning with the murder he committed in 1590, when he caught his first wife Maria d’Avalos in blatant adultery with her lover Fabrizio Carafa. The madrigals of the fifth and sixth books are to Gesualdo what the black paintings are to Goya: works conceived in a state of solitude, with no limits on the artist’s imagination, born in enclosed spaces and used to moving around in their gloom. Gesualdo’s sixth book of madrigals contains some of the most extraordinary harmonic thinking in the history of Western music – it lives on the edge of modality, its chromatic lines forming chord progressions that still sound fresh and unpredictable to modern ears.

Fabio Biondi’s immense curiosity for characterful music – especially of forgotten scores from the Baroque – yields another fabulous surprise with Francesco Feo’s oratorio San Francesco di Sales. Feo’s reputation is at last starting to wax after having waned dramatically in the nineteenth century and thenceforward: in his own age he was compared very highly with Bach and Handel, and Charles Burney was moved to describe his vocal music as being “full of fire and invention and force in the melody and expression of the words”; Feo was also a boon companion of Pergolesi. He wrote both operas (such as Siface – which had a libretto by Metastasio) and church music, with compositions which demanded significant vocal virtuosity from his performers. San Francesco di Sales: apostolo del Chablais is a set of reflections and imagery on the work of this inspirational Catholic Bishop of Geneva from the turn of the seventeenth century, and the oratorio probably saw the light of day in 1734. This new release, further evidence of Glossa’s commitment to the music of the Neapolitan Baroque, presents Fabio Biondi directing the highly-versatile forces of the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester and four of today’s brightest and most stylish voices as the oratorio’s soloists: sopranos Monica Piccinini and Roberta Mameli, contralto Delphine Galou, and bass Luca Tittoto. Ample opportunity is also provided in Feo’s score for instrumental virtuosity, and Biondi’s own abundant violinistic flair is much to the fore here.

Limited edition, and available only for a limited time.

The extraordinary series of recordings of the nine published books of madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi, by Claudio Cavina, with him directing (and singing in) the Italian ensemble La Venexiana, is now being made available in an advantageously-priced box set on Glossa. Completed in 2006, this multi-award winning cycle set new standards in textual declamation, rhetorical colour and harmonic refinement, reflecting the individual singers’ grasp of the compositional pearls created by Monteverdi's poetic gems, with works spanning half a century.

Some of the major works to be found in La Venexiana’s survey include the 'Lamento della ninfa', the 'Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda' and the 'Lamento d’Arianna'. An added attraction is the addition, as a bonus CD, of the 'Live in Corsica' album of Monteverdi madrigals recorded by La Venexiana in 2002.

This limited edition box set reflects Glossa’s innovative design style used for the individual volumes and includes all the original booklets as a pdf, plus a newly-commisioned essay from Stefano Russomanno, who wrote the notes for the individual volumes. He considers the entire span of these nine books, Monteverdi’s compositional development as a radical, if not reforming artist, and his devotion, above all, to the word. - Glossa

In commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, La Ritirata and Josetxu Obregon have created a program for Glossa sallying forth on the back of music composed by Antonio Caldara and inspired by El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Manch. Antonio Caldara was neither the first nor the last composer to have his compositional ingenuity sparked off by Cervantes' timeless masterpiece. Interspersed between these vocal contributions are a series of instrumental ballets composed for these operas.