The oratorio "Der Kampf der Buße und Bekehrung" (the struggle for penance and conversion) is among Johann Michael Haydn's lesser-known works. The Purcell Choir together with the Orfeo Orchestra, under the direction of György Vashegyi now present a recording of the second and only surviving part of this three-part oratorio. It is impressive, especially for its unusual scoring: All of the the five solo roles are allotted to sopranos. The artistic mixture of majestic passages, surprising turns, Baroque rhetorical figures and virtuoso arias makes clear why later composers (e.g., Mozart, Schubert or Bruckner) repeatedly took Johann Michael Haydn's music as their model.

One of Michael Haydn's symphonies was taken for Mozart for a long time, and a good deal of their music is linked by its Salzburg roots. The sacred music on this disc, however, either postdates or predates Mozart and sounds very little like him. Included are four short masses for the Lenten season (all but one lacking Glorias, like some other masses of the period) and a charming Graduale for Palm Sunday. All but the concluding Missa Sanctae Crucis were written in the 1790s, after an ecclesiastical reform mandated simple, syllabic settings of liturgical texts, and the Missa Sanctae Crucis is a simple, youthful work. The music is accompanied only by a small continuo group.

Jean-Marie Leclair's Scylla et Glaucus (Tragédie en un prologue et cinq actes, Paris, 1746) provides an excellent opportunity for György Vashegyi, a luxury cast and music scholars at the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles to revisit the French Baroque operatic canon and emerge with a fresh new take on this established work, the violin virtuoso and composer's single offering for the Paris Opéra.

The French tenor, Cyrille Dubois, returns to his favourite period in music: Baroque. Pursuing his mission as a trailblazer, he has teamed up with the Hungarian conductor György Vashegyi and the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles to create a recital aimed at reviving little-known treasures of the Eighteenth Century French operatic repertoire - several of the pieces are recorded here for the first time.

Glossa continues its major contribution to the recording of the music of Jean-Philippe Rameau with a further ballet héroïque, Les Fêtes de Polymnie, directed by György Vashegyi and featuring accomplished ramistes such as Aurélia Legay, Emöke Barath or Mathias Vidal, and led by the incomparable Véronique Gens in the various vocal roles that appear in the Prologue and the three Entrées of this work.

With Jean-Baptiste Stuck's Polydore, Gyorgy Vashegyi's directing talents alight once again on a French opera from the era between Lully and Rameau. Whist Louis XIV's reign was gradually drawing to a close, his nephew, duke Philippe d'Orleans - due to become regent for Louis XV on the death of the child's great-grandfather, the Sun King - was greatly expanding his own court cultural activities (within which he had a pronounced predilection for Italian music). The Tuscany-born, later-naturalized Frenchman, Giovanni Battista Stuck was a beneficiary of ducal and regental munificence and, given that taste for opera continued at full tilt in Paris after Louis XIV's death in 1715, Stuck was well-placed to prove his worth. His most highly regarded opera is Polydore, a 1720 tragedie en musique with a libretto confected by Simon-Joseph Pellegrin: a mythological tale of Greeks, Thracians and Trojans, interweaving war, family and love, with tragedy brewing up throughout the work.