Gluck composed “Ezio” only one year after the success of “Orfeo”. It was premiered in 1763 at the Burgtheatre in Vienna. Although not as successful as “Orfeo” it contains many fine moments and this recording, in which Michael Hofstetter conducts a first rate cast, should introduce more opera listeners to this fine work. “….the representation of his (Gluck’s) early and middle years is patchy. All the more fitting then, to be able to welcome a thoroughly satisfactory issue of Ezio….. It is greatly to the credit of countertenor Franco Fagioli, who sings the part (Ezio, sung by the famous castrato Guadagni in the première) in this recording, that there is no sense of anticlimax: he produces firm, expressive singing, with delicacy where appropriate.”

A superstar in her homeland and in high demand worldwide as a soloist, South Korean violinist, Bomsori Kim, presents her solo debut on Deutsche Grammophon. Violin On Stage includes works written for or inspired by opera and ballet. Recorded in December 2020 at the state-of-the-art National Forum of Music in Wroclaw and performed with the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic and its music director, Giancarlo Guerrero, the album captures the close bond Bomsori feels with Poland, its music, and musicians.

Gardiner illuminates Alceste's subtle colors and inflections, assisted by von Otter, whose perceptive performance as Alceste is one of emotional sincerity and spot-on vocal accuracy. Despite being a watershed between baroque and classical opera - and a major influence on Mozart, Berlioz and even Wagner -Gluck (1714-87) is still best known today for one opera. Orfeo ed Euridice might be a masterpiece but it's one that has tended to overshadow his other fine achievements.

Here we have the first complete recording of Gluck's charming one-act serenata teatrale for chamber orchestra and four treble voices, composed for the marriage of Hapsburg Archduke Joseph in January 1765. The Archduke's first wife had died. This time he was to marry the Bavarian princess, Maria Josepha. For this performance of the new Gluck work, four of the Archduke's daughters from his first marriage who were all accomplished musicians, sang roles in the new work. The new bridegroom's younger brother Leopold, conducted. That the four Archduchesses could successfully negotiate the florid soprano roles Gluck fashioned for them, is most impressive.

With Le Jardin de Monsieur Rameau, William Christie invites us to take a pleasant walk in the beautiful garden of French vocal music from the XVIIIth Century. Featured composers include Rameau and his contemporaries, and the repertoire ranges from opera highlights and profane cantatas to instrumental interludes. Christie's program presents a vivid overview of the music that was played in Versailles at the peak of its splendor. The album's vocal soloists are young singers who took part in Le Jardin des Voix (The Garden of Voices) - a biannual musical academy led by William Christie and Paul Agnew that is designed to unveil the most promising talents of the coming generation.

Among Gluck's three Italian 'reform' operas, Paride ed Elena (1770) comes, in every respect, third. Gluck's reformist notion, of concentrating in each opera on a single dramatic theme, is followed here as in Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, but in this case the theme—certainly to us, but seemingly to Gluck's own audiences too—is less momentous. We cannot be as excited as we are by the grand, all-embracing love-death themes of the other two by what Gluck himself described as the portrayal in music of the different characters of two nations, the Phrygians and the Spartans, ''contrasting the rude and savage nature of the one with all that is delicate and soft in the other'' (Spartan austerity, that is, against Trojan voluptuousness).

Christoph Willibald Gluck was severely annoyed. He was now 60, and still had to deal with the same annoyances he had for decades: the turbulent life at the Paris Opera, for which he was always writing new stage works, the many rehearsals with petulant divas, the orchestra musicians, with whom Gluck was rarely satisfied. According to contemporary witnesses, he had to retire to the sickbed for a while due to exhaustion. Here he dreamt up a dream world: an opera radically freed of ballast, without ballet, without a large chorus, with only a few performers and a greatly reduced orchestra.

Shirley Verrett makes a deeply impressive Orfeo, firm and pure in sound, classically restrained in expression; and her "Che farò", at a moderate, beautifully judged speed, is very finely sung, poised and quietly moving. The set is conducted by Renato Fasano, whose pacing of the score shows a very sure touch. The dance music has a grace and lightness, and a stylistic command, that one might not have expected from an orchestra which in those days seemed to be fed chiefly on a diet of Vivaldi.

Venezuelan born male soprano Samuel Mariño (*1993) presents his debut album with baroque arias by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Georg Friedrich Händel. Gluck and Händel met each other and played music together in London in 1746. For this release, the original program of that concert was expanded with arias tailor-made for male soprano. This album is unique in every respect. It includes first recordings of works that are sensationally beautiful and that have never been heard before. And then there is a voice, a male soprano, singing for the first time in 250 years things that no man before him was able to sing.

This four disc set from Erato opens with Gluck’s three act lyric tragedy Iphigénie en Aulide, his first original ‘French’ opera for the fashionable Paris Opéra. In 1773 Gluck had been persuaded that he could establish himself at the Paris Opéra (also known as L’Opéra) by François du Roullet, an attaché at the French Embassy in Vienna. Baille du Roullet provided Gluck with the libretto for Iphigénie en Aulide, based on the tragedy of Racine and founded on the play of Euripides. Initially the Director of L’Opéra hesitated in accepting Gluck’s score. Fortunately he had a influential ally in Marie-Antoinette, the Queen of France, to whom he had taught singing and harpsichord. The first staging of Iphigénie en Aulide was at the Paris Opéra in 1774.

Demofoonte dates from the early Milan years of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787), long before the radical reform operas for which he is most famous and his break with opera seria and the librettos of Pietro Metastasio. Gluck arrived in the northern Italian city in 1737 and was mentored there by composer Giovanni Battista Sammartini. Though Sammartini primarily composed symphonies and music for the church, Milan boasted a vibrant opera scene, and Gluck soon formed an association with one of the city's up-and-coming opera houses, the Teatro Regio Ducal.

Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler already enjoyed a worldwide legendary standing during his lifetime - he was considered the German conductor and performances were greeted with rapturous applause. Today, more than 50 years after his death, Wilhelm Furtwangler is still an icon and his work has become an integral part ofthe music scene. But just what makes up this fascination? And what makes his recordings so special? This edition provides the answers.

The 300th anniversary of Christoph Willibald Glucks birth in 2014 was celebrated at the Teatro Real in Madrid with a new production of Alceste (French version), staged by Krysztof Warlikowski and starring Angela Denoke as Alceste. Alceste is Glucks most programmatic example of his quest for purer expression and deeper meaning. All its elements show a conscious effort to recreate the tragic origins of opera: its staunch dramatic unity, austere musical form, use of the chorus as a fundamental part of the story and, above all, its anachronistic but devoted adaptation of Euripides' tragedy.

This is the first project in a seven-volume series exploring the ‘Sturm und Drang’ movement, which swept through all art forms in the between the early 1760s and 1780s. The purpose of this movement were to frighten and perturb through the use of wild and subjective emotional means of expression.