The impression of the ink still being wet on the page is not an unfamiliar one when listening to Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante, such is the freshness and elan they inject into everything they turn their musical attentions to. However in the case of their Vivaldi Edition Argippo the ink pretty much was still wet as they recorded it, because this is Bernardo Ticci's 2019 reconstruction of what is in fact a lost Vivaldi pasticcio (a cutting and pasting together of music from other operas), created in 1730 for the Venetian impresario Antonio Peruzzi to stage in Vienna and Prague. The reconstruction has been possible because the librettos from those two productions remain, plus a set of arias, and also the full score of a complete three-act, untitled and anonymous opera featuring arias from up to twelve other composers – and both the arias and the score appear to be derived, albeit with many changes, from the Prague libretto. The result is a reconstruction which on the one hand is decidedly scant on actual music by Vivaldi, given that even those arias believed to be from his pen can't be confirmed as such, and they appear alongside arias by Galeazzi, Pescetti, Hasse, Porpora, (possibly) Fiorè and Vinci. However, it's also a stylistically diverse and thus thoroughly entertaining offering that bears all the hallmarks of a Vivaldi pasticcio, and is undoubtedly in the spirit of one. Argippo's action takes place in the Bengali Kingdom – a tapping into the contemporary Venetian enthusiasm for tales of the East, although that influence didn't bleed into the musical style itself. A classic Baroque opera plot centred around lies and mistaken identities – King Argippo of Chittagong and his wife Osira almost lose their lives while visiting the court of the Gran Mogol Tisifaro, because the Tisifaro's cousin Silvero seduces his daughter Zanaida while disguised as Argippo – it's high on drama and strife before eventually reaching its happy conclusion. So, add the multi-composer score, and Biondi's five-strong cast have plenty to get their teeth into. Highlights include the opera's first fizzing showstopper, “Se lento ancora”, contralto Delphine Galou as the Gran Mogol Tisifaro's daughter Zanaida making light work of her leaping figures and embellishments as she anguishes over being betrayed by her lover. Also the soft and fruity-toned fluidity to the vocal acrobatics of ‘Un certo non so che’, sung by soprano Marie Lys as a fearful Osira. Equally fine voiced are soprano Emőke Baráth in the title role, contralto Marianna Pizzolato as Silvero, and bass Luigi de Donato as Tisifaro. Europa Galante themselves bring it all together with their characteristic blend of warmth, fizz and dramatic flair, having launched things with a cracker of an opening Sinfonia. In short, great fun. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz

The Carnival of Venice in 1729 was quite unlike any other. Over a period of two months, opera houses went into a frenzy of competition to show off the most famous singers of the day, including the legendary castrato Farinelli who made his astonishing Venetian debut. Several of the most fashionable composers rose to the occasion, writing ravishing music for spectacular productions which often pitted the singers against each other in breathtaking displays of virtuosity. The results were sensational; one tour de force followed another in an atmosphere of fevered excitement and the adoring public lapped it up. The carnival opened with a star-studded cast in Leonardo Leo’s tragedy Cantone in Utica from which the dazzling aria Soffre talor del vento and the more gentle Ombra adorata are taken. Farinelli triumphed in Nicolo Porpora’s opera Semiramide, the perfect vehicle for his extraordinary technique. By contrast Adelaide by Giuseppe Maria Orlandini, another premiere, contains show-stopping displays for Farinelli’s arch rival Faustina Bordoni. And Germiano Giacomelli’s elegant opera Gianguir contains the achingly beautiful aria Mi par sentir la bella. Most of these rediscovered works are recorded here for the first time. (c) Pentatone

Karel Ancerl dispatches Prokofiev's fearsome Alexander Nevsky Cantata with admirable speed and efficiency. While for some who admire the massive and monumental work, speed and efficiency might be the last thing one wants in a Nevsky, for those to whom the work has always seemed a little overblown, Ancerl's 1963 recording with the Czech Philharmonic will be just the thing. Because while no one could doubt the strength and energy of the performance, no one could accuse Ancerl of playing to the last row of the balcony.But as admirable as Ancerl's Nevsky is, his recording of Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto is even better. Partnered with the superb and soulful André Navarra, Ancerl turns in a performance of nearly unmatched lyricism and power. Nearly unmatched because, of course, there is always the Rostropovich premiere recording that invariably must be regarded as all but definitive. But despite competition from the all but definitive, Navarra and Ancerl have a leaner and harder conception of the work and if their lyricism is not quite as expressive as Rostropovich's, their power is completely convincing. The remastered sound of Supraphon's stereo originals is warm and clear, but a bit distant.© TiVo

Recorded in July 2018 at “Studio” - a new high-tech venue in the outskirts of Paris - this album (which was built entirely on Julie Fuchs' own idea) is dedicated to orphaned women in 19th century opera, between 1815 and 1850, who were struggling to escape the miserable conditions which they found themselves in. Following her huge success in 2018 in Rossini's Count Ory at the Opéra-Comique de Paris, Julie Fuchs was keen to further explore this repertoire. Conducted by Enrique Mazzola (a real “opera maestro”) the Orchestre National d'Île-de-France is dazzling in these operatic excerpts by Donizetti and Rossini, as well as - and most importantly – those by Pacini, Raimondi, Fioravanti, Berlioz, Barbieri and Meyerbeer. This album presents another opportunity for listeners to be won over by Fuchs’ sumptuous voice. The young French lyrical soprano first made a name for herself at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, before joining the opera ensemble at the Zurich Opera House in 2013. Further successes followed in Salzburg, Vienna and Paris as well as at the Teatro Real in Madrid. This incredibly versatile repertoire jumps from Mozart to Barbara, Cole Porter, George Crumb and Björk. Julie Fuchs knows no musical boundaries, performing with equal ease in opera as she does in concert next to the young pianist Alphonse Cemin. On Mademoiselle she sings in Italian, French and Spanish, journeying through romantic Bel Canto with a wonderfully original touch and revealing all aspects of her agile, sensual voice. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Yes, it's an album of bassoon music from the early seventeenth century, fabulously illustrated with a painting of a big party by Sebastian Vrancx. Perhaps not the sort of thing to knock Kelly Clarkson off the top of the charts, but an interesting exploration of the instrument with perhaps the most tangled history among the members of the modern orchestra. The title Fagotto, Bassoon, Dulcian, Curtal? refers to that history; the bassoon had multiple ancestors whose names indicated their distinguishing features, many of which came together in the modern instrument. The booklet goes into these names in quite a bit of detail, aided by illustrations from Marin Mersenne's Harmonie universelle of 1631 and Praetorius' Syntagma Musicum. The German name for the instrument, Fagott, is related indirectly to the English "faggot," or a bundle of sticks, which the bassoon was thought to resemble; the term is odd in that the actual German word, Fagott, lacks this connotation. "Bassoon" itself comes from the French words "bas son," or low sound, and refers to various outdoor instruments with double bores that preceded the bassoon. "Dulcian" (or doucaine, or dulziana) meant "sweet sound," and referred to the pleasant sound of double-bore instruments, while "curtal" was an English word meaning short and referring to some truncated double-bore ancestors of the bassoon. The buyer may hope to hear all these instruments realized in sound on the disc, but that would have been too much to ask in the absence of surviving musical evidence as to how early bassoons were used. Instead, listeners will hear bassoons of various sizes, types, and what one might call buzzing quotients, played by the group Syntagma Amici, about which nothing is said in the booklet; the ensemble also includes several small keyboard instruments. They play dances of the early seventeenth century, and arrangements of vocal music, by Banchieri, Verdelot, Susato, and Praetorius himself, interspersed with a few more virtuosic solo bassoon pieces by Phillip Friedrich Böddecker and others. Most of the music is unfamiliar, but it doesn't offer great divergences from the short dances heard on recorder-group recitals and the like. This release is likely to be of most interest to specialists, and, of course, to those who love the bassoon. Booklet notes are in French, German, and English.© TiVo

Not much is known of the life of Giacomo Gorzanis, born around 1520, and died in 1579; he was almost certainly blind, probably from birth, judging from the note written in his Third Book for lute published in Venice in 1564 ("I, blind" and "I, deprived of light"); he was probably a very famous lutist, going by the note on his First Book of lute in 1562 lauding his"long experience over many years with the lute", and he probably also sang at the court of Archduke Charles II of Austria, if the note in his Second Book of Neapolitan songs of 1571 is to be believed: "the memory I retain, as your humble servant, and the true affection I bear for you." In short, it was a full life, in which Gorzanis would publish no less than five volumes of tablature for the lute between 1561 and 1575, and two books of Neapolitan songs in 1570 and 1571, which are precious glimpses of what is probably a much broader body of work, but of which now very little remains. The subjects taken on by the villanelles and other songs run from Petrarch and Ariosto to rather more daring stuff, even making allusions to forbidden love, the eternal subject matter of "popular" songs from the Renaissance to today. These pages, while still marked with a hefty dose of polyphony in the accompaniment, turn rather more towards the new style of melody, underpinned by a simple backcloth of chords – the ancestor of canzone napoletana, as it were, in which the line sung takes precedence over any other consideration. Pino de Vittorio (who sings but also plays the naker) is accompanied by Fabio Accurso and Bor Zuljan on lute and guitar, as well as Domen Marinčič on viole da gamba and percussion – including the dulce melos, a kind of hammered zither – played by Massimiliano Dragoni. © SM/Qobuz

Antonio Sacchini's L'abbandono delle ricchezze di S. Filippo Neri was composed in 1765 for a semi-private occasion and, like much of the other Italian sacred music of the last part of the 18th century, has been known only to the deepest of specialists. The notes here bill it as "an oratorio about the father of oratorio" -- the saint Filippo Neri was associated with the emergence of a declamatory style in the late 16th century -- but Sacchini called it an azione sacra ("sacred drama"), and indeed, it is an opera in all but name, with a succession of fizzy arias of basically similar sunny tone, separated by recitatives. The title means "The Renunciation of Riches by Saint Filippo Neri," and the tale dramatizes an episode from the saint's life in allegorical form. Filippo, perhaps because of his youth at the time, is sung by a soprano, as is Povertà ("Poverty"). The most attractive feature of the work is the writing for these two, effectively brought to life by sopranos Yeree Suh and Ketevan Chuntishvili. These two, one a veteran and the other a newcomer, make an admirably contrasting pair in the duet "Tanta dolcezza O Dio!" at the end of the first part. There are also parts for Splendor and Deception, and these are ably handled by tenor Markus Schäfer and bass Daniel Ochoa. Another point of interest is the recitatives, divided between harpsichord and organ accompaniment. Conductor Franz Hauk, leading the ensemble Concerto de Bassus, keeps things moving and does not try to find more in the music than is there. Vocal aficionados and lovers of the early Classical period will find enjoyment here. © James Manheim /TiVo

The only complete survey available of the keyboard music written by a forward-looking contemporary of Monteverdi. Giovanni Picchi (1572-1643) flourished in Venice, notably as the organist at the Scuola di San Rocco. He became renowned as a composer of both secular and sacred music, attested by his presence in the Nobiltà di dame by Fabrizio Caroso, the most important collection of dance music of the time. A collection of his canzone was published in 1625 and his fame spread to England, where a Toccata for Harpsichord was transcribed within the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (of which Brilliant has recently released the first-ever complete recording). In 1619, Picchi published Intavolatura di balli d’arpicordo, one of the rare collections of music for keyboard moulded on contemporary dance music. The majority of Picchi's dances are composed in pairs. Three of the four Passamezzos are followed by a Saltarello in triple meter. The short dances in duple meter (Ballo alla Polacha, Ballo Ongaro and the Todescha) conclude with either a balletto or saltarello in triple meter. The Padoana ditta la Ongara and the Ongara a un altro modo obviously form a single composition consisting of variations. Other important sources for his keyboard music include collections published in Venice in 1621 and an undated collection of intablatures (transcriptions and elaborations of music by other composers) which is now held in Turin. Together they amount to some of the most brilliant and appealing music for the harpsichord from 17th-century Italy. Picchi’s harmonic language was especially daring, and his flair as a performer is reflected in the style of his writing, which exploits the full range of the instrument. In complement to Picchi’s work, Simone Stella has chosen other jewels from Venetian composers of the time: toccatas, ricercare and canzone by Annibale Padovano, Claudio Merulo, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli and Vincenzo Bellavere. Bellavere is another neglected figure nowadays, but the Toccata recorded here is a gloriously ornate example of the genre, alternating intricate counterpoint with filigree decoration. Played on the harpsichord by Simone Stella. © Brilliant Classics

After four years of relative silence following a sophomore album menacingly named Elegant and Dying, many had assumed that Adelaide, Australia's Virgin Black had probably breathed their last; but the orchestral gothic metal project was in fact very much alive, and simply grappling with the challenge of composing a two-and-a-half-hour, three-part song cycle entitled Requiem. April 2007 saw the release of its first installment on CD, although Requiem: Mezzo Forte, as it was called, actually comprised the trilogy's second chapter, with acts one and three -- all recorded simultaneously à la the Lord of the Rings movies -- still forthcoming. Nevertheless, Virgin Black fans will quickly discover that this first, 52-minute mid-section of what's surely to become the band's magnum opus, already feels like the fulfillment of their thus far nebulous musical destiny. In it, their "gothic metal with strings" template is effectively transformed into an altogether grander full-blown symphony with gothic metal elements, marked by predominantly orchestral movements such as the extravagant "Requiem, Kyrie," the sublime melancholy of "Midnight's Hymn," and the suitably suicidal epic "...And I Am Suffering." Truly, this distinct shift in focus is more far reaching than some may at first assume, since scarce are the tracks here ("Domine," "Lacrimosa") where guitars, bass, drums, and non-choir vocals take prominence over the pervasive orchestra commissioned for its recording (although heavier, doom/death tendencies glimpsed here are promised to dominate the trilogy's third chapter). And, as with every Virgin Black release, classically trained operatic talents are employed as needed to carry out each song's morose poetics, while chief musical architect Rowan London has notably improved his clean singing, which he alternates with a fearsome Cookie Monster growl here. In sum, it is now obvious that rumors of Virgin Black's demise were terribly exaggerated, and if the remaining two portions of the Requiem trilogy are anywhere near as accomplished as this first one, fans are in for a magnificent musical adventure.© Eduardo Rivadavia /TiVo