Handel's Rodelinda, regina de' Longobardi, HWV 19, was a hit at its first performance in 1725 and has dropped out of the repertory only during periods when all of Handel's operas did. It is absolutely loaded with great Handelian tunes and also has a more-than-coherent plot involving an imprisoned queen in a conquered Milan, the intrigue that swirls around her among her lustful conquerors, and her disguised husband, Bertarido, who attempts to rescue her. The lead role has drawn star sopranos from Joan Sutherland on down, but many listeners will be drawn to the singing here of Lucy Crowe, who really inhabits the role. She sang it with the Dutch National Opera, and here, she returns with convincing delivery that will keep listeners' heads out of the libretto. She is aided by the clean playing of the English Concert under Harry Bicket, who leads from the harpsichord, and a strong supporting cast, including the ideal Iestyn Davies as Bertarido. This performance was planned for the English Concert's annual live concert at Carnegie Hall in New York; that was canceled due to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, but Bicket and the group decided to record the opera instead, inaugurating a new series of Handel operas. The socially distanced playing and singing at St. John's Smith Square is a little rusty in spots, and the venue is somewhat airy for the music, but all in all, this is a Handel opera performance that makes one anxious for more of the same for the performers.© TiVo

Based on the opposite side of the world – well, actually Sydney in Australia is on the opposite side of the world from the Açores, but let's not quibble – to Western Europe, the Pingchut Opera troupe, based in Sydney, has been carving a niche for itself in the world of baroque music since its foundation in 2002. Their aim: to play operas, either in the baroque style or at least written before the end of the 18th century, on period instruments, with voices picked from among their Oceanian friends. Cavalli, Vivaldi, Monteverdi, Rameau, Grétry, Salieri or Charpentier, all of whom the – rather conservative – Australian lyrical establishment are rather cagey about putting on, are their home turf. But also this work, Mozart's Idomeneo: his first great "mature" opera, written after he escaped a life as a dogsbody for a domineering Prince-Archbishop, and the stifling world of Salzburg society, to seek his fortune in Vienna. In it, there are great arias, of course; mind-blowing ensembles, naturally; and while the subject matter is still historical classicism – unlike in his later operas, which will deal with everyday life or the world of magic, as with the Flute – the "musical" content is that of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, the Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni. This is a superb addition to the discography of the work, in a musicologically rigorous reading, with utterly sumptuous voices which really have nothing to envy in either hemisphere. © SM/Qobuz

This release showed up on classical best-seller charts in the late summer of 2023, perhaps because it represented a genuinely original experiment. Mezzo-soprano Stéphanie d'Oustrac, the small ensemble Le Poème Harmonique, and conductor and theorbist suggest... well, what, exactly? That there is an affinity between French popular song and French and Italian music of the 17th century? Not quite, although there were intriguing connections between popular song, outlined in the booklet, and the very earliest stages of the historical performance movement at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The program is organized into three sections, "Jeunesse," "Les vieux airs," and "Les amours passées," but the 20th century songs and the 17th century pieces mostly don't overlap within these groups; "Les amours passées" are all popular songs. The program makes quite a lurch between an excerpt from Cavalli's L'Egisto and Paul Marinier's D'elle à lui, and the lurch would have been even greater if the popular songs hadn't been chosen to exclude any hints of African-American-influenced song. Léon Fossey's Les canards tyroliens, a kind of yodeling song about ducks, simply doesn't inhabit the same universe as Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna. Perhaps it would be best to say, as the publicity does, that there are "echoes" between the two traditions, and d'Oustrac plainly has enthusiasm for both repertories; her personality is largely enough to carry the listener through. There is definitely a need for programming and performance that mixes classical and popular material, which have never been as far apart as they have been made out to be. This release may not be a definitive solution, but it is an intriguing and listenable attempt. © James Manheim /TiVo

Poro, re delle Indie, HWV 28 (a.k.a. Poro, re dell'Indie, Poro, or Porus), a Handel opera seria of 1731, was a great success at the beginning, and modern scholars have pronounced it one of the finest Handelian operas. The work is performed from time to time, in the original Italian or in German translation, but recordings have been sparse. The opera constructs a romantic plot around the clash between Alexander the Great and the Indian king Porus, who interestingly is attested only in Greek sources, not Indian ones. Also interesting is that the libretto by Pietro Metastasio was originally called Alessandro nell'Indie, but Handel's opera shifts the central role to Porus, perhaps because the famed castrato Senesino was set to perform the part. Here, the role of Poro is ably handled by countertenor Christopher Lowrey. However, a notable feature of the opera, and perhaps one that made this the second-most-popular of Metastasio's libretti behind only the ubiquitous Artaserse (Artaxerxes) is the large collection of strong vocal roles, giving several singers the chance to shine. The opera seria pitfall of a series of set pieces is avoided, and the drama unfolds naturally. The role of Poro is balanced that of Alessandro himself, for tenor voice, and here, Marco Angioloni, one of a new breed of singer-directors, is very strong. Hear also Giuseppina Bridelli as Poro's sister Erissena, a rich, compelling contralto. In his role as director of the ensemble Il Groviglio Angioloni, he favors a substantial ensemble (ten violins) capable of rough, rather percussive attacks. With an English opera, an Italian ensemble, and an international cast of singers, this release marks a step out for the Château de Versailles label, which generally emphasizes French Baroque repertory. The music is, however, a fine choice and beautifully brought off.© James Manheim /TiVo

Ever since Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus and the subsequent film by Milos Forman, the operas of Mozart's rival Antonio Salieri have enjoyed a revival: historians determined that not only did Salieri not poison Mozart, he admired him, and Mozart at least respected the older Italian. Indeed, Les Horaces (1786) represents several accomplishments that were not on Mozart's résumé: it is a full-scale French opera, and its recitatives are orchestrally accompanied and contribute elegantly to the action. Berlioz, always an astute critic, numbered himself among the admirers of Salieri's French operas of the 1780s; this one was not as successful as the others, but that could have been due to any number of factors. The plot deals with a woman, Camille, whose romantic life is caught between factions in a war in early Roman times, and Rousset's live reading here benefits from a strong soprano lead, Dutch singer and French Baroque specialist Judith van Wanroij. Other singers likewise step up, but the real credit goes to Rousset, who gets the strengths of Salieri's score: the grand intermèdes, and the exciting finale of Act 1, where the joining-together of action and music is in Mozart's league even if the tunes are not. Also praiseworthy is the engineering work of the curiously named Little Tribeca team, who obtain the best possible sound from none other than Versailles. Highly recommended to those who have dismissed Salieri: this is a sympathetic and enthusiastic performance of his music. © TiVo

In 1743, two years before Rameau’s Platée, Boismortier created an extraordinarily modern and madcap "comic ballet", Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse. As the exuberant plotunfurls, Cervantes’ hero encounters monsters, enchanters, princesses and people from Japan, making for plenty of offbeat and audacious dances and choruses. Musical beautyrubs shoulders with satirical and irreverent comedy. A choice work for Hervé Niquet, who leads his Concert Spirituel with unparalleled energy! © Château de Versailles Spectacles

Christophe Rousset and the Talens Lyriques bring us to the stage of the Royal Academy of Music where Pygmalion, an act of ballet by Jean-Philippe Rameau inspired by an episode of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was created in 1748. Love, showing empathy for Pygmalion’s despair of loving a statue, invigorates the sculpted woman who immediately falls in love with her creator. Very suggestive, the music of this tender and mischievous ballet deploys the grace of 18th century dances. Like Ovid’s Love, Christophe Rousset instils life in this score, one of Rameau’s greatest successes in his day, and offers us, thanks to his sense of drama and his impeccable leadership, a new and essential reading of this ballet. © Aparté

Everyone knows Camille Saint-Saëns has a great sense of humour thanks to his Carnaval des Animaux in which no one escapes ridicule, not even him. Now the Palazzetto Bru Zane Foundation and Hervé Niquet have unearthed Phryné, a forgotten comic opera from 1893 enriched with recitatives composed by André Messager three years later.Received with immense and lasting success in its time, this brilliant work eventually fell into the abyss, never to be seen again. Fortunately, fans of Saint-Saëns made great efforts to rediscover his works on the centenary of his death in 2021. Phryné captures the "Grecomania" that was prevalent in all the arts in France at this time, especially in Offenbach’s music and even in architecture (just think of the beautiful Parisian district of New Athens in the 9th arrondissement). Ironically, and perhaps a little cheekily, Saint-Saens confessed that he was “working on this little piece with infinite pleasure” and was infatuated with this courtesan musician who had served as a model for the sculptor Praxitele.Always keen to discover a forgotten repertoire, Hervé Niquet brought together a few singers, Florie Valiquette, Cyrille Dubois, Anaïs Constans and Thomas Dolié, to breathe some life back into Phryné with his Concert Spirituel, with the aim of producing a concert version to be performed in the Opéra de Rouen Normandie in 2021. Though Lucien Augé’s libretto may seem tasteless today with its hefty dose of misogyny, Saint-Saens’ music is simply delicious, with a succession of arias and ensembles. This modest and charming opera-comedy, which Charles Gounod so enjoyed, offers a less serious and less academic take of a composer that well and truly deserves to be rediscovered. © François Hudry/Qobuz

While Mozart was largely overlooked in the French capital, Antonio Salieri took on the reigns of the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris Opera), a fruitful collaboration that was completely broken up by the French Revolution. After the success of his work Les Danaïdes, composed for Paris in 1784, Salieri worked tirelessly with Beaumarchais, spurred on by the success and scandal of his Figaro, on a new project which would become Tarare. Beaumarchais moved himself shamelessly toward stardom, skillfully self-promoting and attending rehearsals so as to assure that the orchestra played pianissimo to emphasize the primacy of his verse during performances. Beaumarchais found that the music was too overwhelming to “embellish the lyrics”.Created one year after Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (which was relatively well-received in Vienna before triumphing in Prague), Tarare was an immense success in Paris maintaining the status of the composer’s repertoire despite the political turmoil of the time before disappearing from view around 1826, thereon ceasing to be played. Beaumarchais’ words were immediately adapted into Italian by Lorenzo Da Ponte to be performed and met with equal success in Vienna. Tarare is half lyrical tragedy, half comic opera with a hint of orientalism.After resuscitating Les Danaïdes and Les Horaces, Christophe Rousset finished off his series of recordings dedicated to Salieri’s French operas for the Parisian public. Tarare is very much of its time, that of the Lumières, and used the power of art to challenge despotism in all its forms. Thanks to Christophe Rousset’s excellent delivery and lively direction, this recording enables one to judge the merits of the composition and the chasm that separates an honest and talented musician from a solitary and impassioned one like Mozart. © François Hudry/Qobuz

A connoisseur of Mozart, the brilliant young British conductor Ben Glassberg had originally booked a concert version of La Clemenza di Tito to inaugurate his debut as conductor of the Opera de Rouen Normandie in Autumn 2020. However, the Covid epidemic ultimately put an end to this project.Not wanting to squander all the preparatory work and rehearsals, it was instead decided to make a studio recording. There are no complaints here–this new version (which was produced in just four days) is remarkable in every way. Ben Glassberg's direction is theatrical and inspired, and the cast is simply flawless, with English tenor Nicky Spence shining as the strong and noble Titus. The rest of the cast is equally stellar, featuring the incredible Mozartian singers Simona Šaturová (Vitellia) and Anna Stéphany (Sesto).La Clémence de Titus is Mozart's last opera and was hastily composed at the same time as The Magic Flute. Unfortunately, it doesn’t receive the same recognition, even though it’s full of superb arias that beautifully express the complexity of human emotion, but in the somewhat staid style of the ‘opera seria’. Though that production by the Opera de Rouen Normandie was cancelled, it has resulted in the studio recording of an entire Mozart opera… Every cloud has a silver lining. © François Hudry/Qobuz

The musical world owes a debt of gratitude to French conductor Christophe Rousset not only for the vital, exquisite performances he delivers with the ensembles Les Talens Lyriques and Choeur de Chambre de Namur, but for his work in bringing to light neglected masterpieces of Baroque opera. Lully's Bellérophon, premiered in 1679, was a huge success in its time, with an initial run of nine months. Part of its popularity was doubtless due to the parallels that could be drawn between its plot and certain recent exploits of Louis XV, but even the earliest critics recognized the score's uniqueness and exceptional quality within Lully's oeuvre, so it's perhaps surprising that it has never been recorded before. The distinctiveness of the music was likely a result at least in part of the fact that Lully's preferred librettist Philippe Quinault was out of favor at the court of Louis XV at the time, so the composer turned to Thomas Corneille for the libretto, and Corneille's literary and dramatic styles were so different from Quinault's that Lully was nudged out of his comfort zone and had to develop new solutions to questions of structure and the marrying of music to text. It is the first opera for which Lully composed fully accompanied recitatives, and that alone gives it a textural richness that surpasses his earlier works. The composer also allows soloists to sing together, something that was still a rarity in Baroque opera. There are several duets and larger ensembles; the love duet, "Que tout parle à l'envie de notre amour extreme!," is a ravishing expression of passion and happiness, as rhapsodic as anything in 19th century Italian opera. The level of musical inventiveness throughout is exceptional even for Lully; the expressiveness of the recitatives, the charm of the instrumental interludes, the originality of the choruses, and the limpid loveliness of the airs make this an opera that demands attention. Rousset and his forces give an outstanding performance that's exuberantly spirited, musically polished, rhythmically springy, and charged with dramatic urgency. The soloists are consistently of the highest order. Cyril Auvity brings a large, virile, passionate tenor to the title role and Céline Scheen is warmly lyrical as his lover Philonoë. Ingrid Perruche is fiercely powerful as the villain, Stéenobée, and Jean Teitgen is a secure, authoritative Apollo. Soloists, chorus, and orchestra are fluent in the subtle inflections of French middle Baroque ornamentation. The sound of the live recording is very fine, with a clean, immediate, realistic ambience. This is a release that fans of Baroque opera will not want to miss. Highly recommended. © TiVo

Saying that this is a great Don Giovanni, a great Furtwängler Don Giovanni, and one of the greatest Don Giovanni's of the twentieth century is hardly to exaggerate the importance of this recording. Made on July 27, 1953, at the Salzburg Festival, it preserves a performance by one of the best casts ever assembled for the opera -- Cesare Siepi, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth Grummer, Anton Dermota, Otto Edelmann, Erna Berger, and Walter Berry -- backed by the best orchestra for the opera -- the Vienna Philharmonic -- and led by surely the greatest German conductor of the twentieth century. Under Furtwängler, the singers and players create a Don Giovanni that is fiery, passionate, romantic, metaphysical, and occasionally hilarious. While some listeners might legitimately prefer a lighter or funnier performance of Don Giovanni, and other listeners might prefer a cleaner or clearer recording of Don Giovanni, anyone who loves the work or the conductor will love this performance and, despite its conspicuous blemishes, this recording. Indeed, for those who love Furtwängler, the question will be whether or not to get a third Furtwängler Don Giovanni. Already in circulation are two performances from the 1954 Salzburg Festival with mostly the same stellar cast, one a sound recording and one a video recording of surprisingly good quality. Of course, for the true Furtwängler aficionado, the opportunity to hear the fabled 1953 Don Giovanni will be irresistible so the question is essentially moot.© TiVo

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The Naxos label has embarked on a series covering lesser-known works of Sibelius, performed by the little-known (outside Finland) but venerable Turku Philharmonic Orchestra under Sibelius veteran Leif Segerstam. They're well worth the time of Sibelius lovers, with clean, idiomatic performances that cover a side of the composer substantially lighter than that shown by his weighty symphonies. Many are associated with the theater, falling into genres like incidental music that really ought not to be forgotten inasmuch as they were the direct ancestors of today's soundtrack music. The music here is known to at least some listeners: Sibelius' incidental music for Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande is performed often in a suite made by the composer, but recordings of the whole set of pieces are rare. The work makes an interesting counterpoint to Debussy's and Schoenberg's better-known sets of pieces, and if the listener can shake free of a linear view of music history, it stands up well to those. Sample the very sparse and powerful Mélisande's song (track 6), given a rich performance by soprano Pia Pajala; it's enough to make one wish Sibelius had been induced to apply his structural thinking to opera. The deep and unified final Andante from Act V could and should be performed more often as an independent work. After the Pélleas music is another piece of incidental music for an abortive project, a trio of waltzes (one vocal), and a little work from the end of Sibelius' career. There might be slightly cleaner versions of the Pélleas et Mélisande music out there, but probably not in a recording that gives the entire work. © TiVo

Jean-Baptiste Lully's Cadmus & Hermione of 1673 was arguably the first true French opera, telling a tragic story (Lully and his librettist Philippe Quinault called it a tragédie en lyrique), employing Italian-style recitatives, and collecting the varied music and dance forms of Louis XIV's opulent court into a coherent narrative that at once celebrated Louis (he is conflated with Cadmus of Thebes) and moved beyond the ceremonial nature of earlier French dramatic music. It's a sprawling work, with five acts, an overture, and a sizable Prologue with its own overture; highlights include a dragon that eats Africans, a monster snake, and a full complement of Greek gods and goddesses. Realization of the work has, until now, been beyond the means of early music performance groups, and this is the world premiere recording of the opera, made in 2019 and based on a 2008 performance at Versailles Palace by some of the same performers. The leader is Vincent Dumestre, conducting the Le Poème Harmonique orchestra and the vocal ensembles Aedes. The forces are large enough to capture the splendor of the music (thankfully, no one-voice-per-part techniques here), and Dumestre is alert to the huge variety of musical devices Lully brings to bear on his story; there are dances, big choruses, bagpipes, and much more. Cadmus & Hermione may be a difficult work to bring to life for modern audiences, but Dumestre keeps things moving along and probably comes as close as anyone could. Of course, anyone interested in the life of the French court in the 17th century will find this an essential acquisition that will keep giving and giving. © TiVo