Today's music lovers associate L’Orfeo first and foremost with Claudio Monteverdi's famous opera from 1607, while the version by Luigi Rossi (1597-1653), premiered four decades later, has remained less well-known. Rossi had served as a musician first for the noble families Borghese and Barberini in Florence and Rome, respectively, before he moved to France in 1646, where he became the most respected composer at the court of Cardinal Mazarin.His L'Orfeo, with a libretto by Francesco Buti, was premiered on 2 March 1647 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris. It was one of the first operas ever performed in France. The premiere was magnificently staged, full of magnificent sets and machinery, with over 200 people employed to work on the scenery. The performance lasted about six hours and was a great success for Rossi. Twenty years after the first recording by Les Arts Florissants and William Christie, Elena Sartori and her ensemble Allabastrina present now the second recording of this opera. The total playing time is slightly under four hours, almost Wagnerian proportions. Sartori uses exclusively Italian forces (17 solo singers and choristers), with the Baroque experts Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli (Orfeo) and Emanuela Galli (Euridice) in the main roles.

During his lifetime, Carl Friedrich Abel was fêted all over Europe both for his supreme skills as a performer of the viola da gamba as well as for the quality of his compositions, and was responsible (along with J.C. Bach) for setting up arguably the first series of subscription concerts in the history of Western music, the “Bach-Abel-Concerts”. Even the prodigy that was Mozart benefited from Abel’s teachings (and was claimed as the composer of one of Abel’s own symphonies). 12 years after his recording of pieces from the Drexel Manuscript (for solo viola da gamba), Paolo Pandolfo teams up with an exquisite ensemble to record a fine selection of Abel’s sonatas, many of them recently discovered and being recorded here for the first time. Often adding his own cadenzas and ornamentations, Pandolfo and his team offer a breathtaking and colorful display of virtuosity and sensibility. The contemporary painter Thomas Gainsborough wrote that Abel “excelled at feeling upon the instrument”, while the writer of one of his obituaries likened him to Laurence Sterne, famous as the author of Tristram Shandy: “The death of Abel occasions a great loss to the musical world. Sensibility is the prevailing and beautiful characteristic of his compositions. He was the Sterne of Music.” Thus, this recording is aptly entitled A Sentimental Journey– an exploration of the world of feeling paralleling Sterne’s unfinished novel A Sentimental Journey though France and Italy.