Since 2001, beginning with Juditha Triumphans, eight operas by Vivaldi have been released in the Vivaldi Edition, each one an event, either the first complete recording (or the first recording!) by first-rate conductors, soloists and orchestras specializing in Baroque. Acclaimed by the press (numerous awards), and by the public (more than 150,000 copies sold since 2001), these recordings have succeeded at last in rehabilitating Antonio Vivaldi, known always for his brilliant concertos, as one of the greatest operatic composers of all time.

Handel's masterpiece Rinaldo is based on Torquato Tasso's epic La Gerusalemme liberata, which tells the tale of the attempted seduction of the hero by the enchantress Armida against the backdrop of the First Crusade. Musicologists agree that Handel carried out a major cut-and-paste exercise with Rinaldo, as more than two thirds of his 1711 score was taken from earlier works. This particular production by Pier Luigi Pizzi, conceived in 1985 for Teatro Romolo Valli in Reggio Emilia, has since travelled to some twenty major opera houses worldwide. Putting aside practical cuts and a few displacements of musical numbers, its durable attraction lies in the gorgeous costumes and scenery, a stylish paragon of 'hyperbaroque' that deliberately avoids both literalism and cheap provocation.

This series of CDs by Tactus and Modo Antiquo represents the first complete recording of the cantatas of Antonio Vivaldi. Up until now, these works have appeared only sporadically on record, yet they constitute quite an important body of works in Vivaldi’s total production. Dedicated exclusively to female voices, the cantatas have here been divided according to the classifications used in the Ryom catalogue: cantatas for soprano and continuo, cantatas for contralto and continuo, cantatas for soprano and instruments, cantatas for contralto and instruments. Modo Antiquo has approached this first complete recording of the cantatas by Vivaldi with full respect for the original texts and the performance practices of the period.

The general wall of obscurity surrounding Vivaldi's operas seems to be lifting. Tito Manlio, a large work composed in 1719 for a royal wedding that was called off at the last minute, was recorded on LPs in the 1970s and in 2006 received two new recordings, released at nearly the same time. So much for the theory that opera on recordings is dying! The opera is a compelling one, with a convincing father-son drama: the ancient Roman consul Tito Manlio (or Titus Manlius) plans to have his son executed for disobedience, but the younger Manlio is saved by a flood of acclamation for his military deeds. The opera seria libretto was set by several other composers of the early eighteenth century. Its central role is the young Manlio, intended for a castrato and sung here by soprano Elisabeth Scholl.

Vivaldi's operas are rarely recorded and even less often performed, but happily they are gradually gaining more exposure. The most familiar and most frequently recorded is his 1727 Orlando Furioso. The fact that it has been on the public's radar is due largely to an excellent 1977 recording starring Marilyn Horne and Victoria de los Angeles, which has been reissued on Erato. The opera has since been recorded twice, and a DVD of a 1989 San Francisco Opera production featuring Horne and Kathleen Kuhlmann has been released. The newer CDs are extraordinarily fine; in choosing between Naïve's 2005 version led by Jean-Christophe Spinosi and this CPO release conducted by Federico Maria Sardelli, the listener is in a win-win position. Both feature stellar soloists, who are also compelling actors, and beautiful orchestral playing.

Antonio Vivaldi composed Arsilda, Regina di Ponto for the Venetian theater of Sant'Angelo in the fall of 1716. While Vivaldi had, by its debut, been an important member of Venetian musical culture for over a decade as a violinist and composer, he had begun composing only three years earlier. Domenico Lalli, his librettist, who settled in Venice in 1710 after fleeing his native Naples upon being charged with embezzlement, was one of the most important librettists of the first decades of the eighteenth century.

The so-called "Anna Maria Partbook" consists of an elegantly bound volume in red leather containing the violin parts of 31 violin concertos, of which 26 are by Antonio Vivaldi. It was the personal repertoire of Vivaldi's most gifted pupil, the famous "Anna Maria della Pieta", who played also the viola d'amore, the mandolin, the theorbo, and the harpsichord. Anna Maria's partbook represents an extraordinary collection of violin concerts of high virtuosity. 20 of the 26 Vivaldi concerts are also known from other manuscript sources. The remaining 6 are known only from the source of Anna Maria, and therefore incomplete: they are divided into 3 concerts for violin and 3 concerts for violin and organ, a pair of instruments widely used by Vivaldi and the Pieta.

Alessandro Scarlatti is generally considered one of the most important Italian composers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. But his music, although it has received more attention in recent years, is still largely unknown. This is partly due to the large quantity of his output: in the genre of the chamber cantata alone at least six hundred compositions are with certainty attributable to him.

The most beautiful arias from the Vivaldi Edition: Orlando Furioso, Atenaide, Farnace, Teuzzone, Armida, La Fida Ninfa, Orlando 1714, Griselda, Ottone in villa and much more. The album includes outstanding singers and arias that were sensational discoveries when first introduced in this series.

This is the 45th title in the Vivaldi Edition, 3 years after the first recording dedicated to Vivaldi scores discovered in Europe between 2000 and 2007, now in its 12th year. This second volume features the most recent discoveries in world premiere recordings and will further contribute to complete one of the most fascinating jigsaw puzzles in musical history Federico Maria Sardelli is a member of the musicological committee of the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi at the Fondazione Cini in Venice, for which he has published numerous scholarly essays. In July 2007 Peter Ryom chose him to continue his monumental work of cataloguing the music of Antonio Vivaldi; since then, Sardelli has been the editor of the Vivaldi Werkverzeichnis (RV).

Since (at least) the Greeks, humorists, moralists and satirists have been fascinated by the artistic game of inversion, of “the world turned upside down”, which is how one might translate the title of this largely forgotten opera by Salieri. It here gets its first ever recording. Present an image of society turned on its head and you enable your audience/reader/viewer to see the actual way of things in a whole new light. Your aims may be to expose the follies and errors of the actual, to propose a better way of doing things, or simply to get some laughs from the resulting improbabilities and surprises - or, of course, a mixture of all these motives and more.

Over the past ten years, thanks in part to the stimulus of the Vivaldi Edition project, several manuscripts by Vivaldi have surfaced in different countries. Federico Maria Sardelli has decided to record the finest of them. So this recording does indeed present new works by Vivaldi. The content is very diverse, ranging from a motet, which is performed by the mezzo-soprano Romina Basso, to an Oboe Concerto, a Recorder Concerto, arias and other gems. There is a clear pattern to these discoveries. Almost all come from peripheral sources, and most appear to originate from special commissions at the margin of the composer’s activity.

Handel Arias is the solo debut of one of the most exciting bass-baritones of today. Expertly advised by Baroque expert, Francesco Lora, Ildebrando fashions his debut album into a panoramic sweep of Italian Handel arias for bass-baritone. Mixing well-known and rare, lyric with highly virtuosic, Ildebrando’s phenomenal Handel shows the versatility and wide range of Handel’s compositions for bass-baritone and the vocal capacity of the singer to master this programme. Undeniably appealing to all voice and Baroque music lovers, this album will excite music lovers well beyond.

This box set gathers the finest vocal recordings (opera, sacred music) from the Vivaldi Edition by some of the most reputed artists of today. Also it features the main vocal ranges: soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, tenor, bass.

Il Farnace is the most re-written and re-proposed of Vivaldi’s operas, it’s like a beloved child who worries his father, and to whom the parent always wants to give the best. Versions of Farnace, two in 1727 and one each in 1730, 1731 and 1732, had been conceived and adapted to the different circumstances for Venice, Prague, Pavia and Mantua, always with a cast to Vivaldi’s satisfaction and with the composer in control of the production.