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.

For approaching a century and a half in France – across the reigns of Louis XIV, XV and XVI – the Palace of Versailles played host, both indoors and outdoors, for an extraordinary sequence of dramatic musical performances. Un Opéra pour trois rois, conducted by György Vashegyi, represents the legacy of that time, a specially constructed operatic entertainment drawn from works by composers from Lully to Gluck, commissioned – and even, on occasion, performed – by kings, their queens and inamoratas.

The myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus, as terrible as it is fascinating, has been retold by many artists over the centuries, including composers. This recording presents the first performance of Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne's opera in it's complete form since the premiere. It reveals a work whose classical surface conceals a style that is vehement, exalted and threatening by turns, a thrilling testimony to the bubbling energy of pre-Romanticism. Served by the total commitment of the Orfeo Orchestra and Purcell Choir under the direction of György Vashegyi, the drama closes in on the inescapable destinies of Phèdre, Hippolyte and Thésée, movingly sung by Judith van Wanroij, Julien Behr and Tassis Christoyannis.

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.

Responsories for the Triduum sacrum, the last three days of the Holy Week before Easter Sunday, are classic examples of Haydn’s manner of composing, as influenced by the “stile antico”. With these homophonic pieces, which are directed inwards and which concentrate on the expressive presentation of the text, Haydn stands in a long tradition of these multi-voice settings: this tradition ranges from Victoria and Ingegneri at the end of the 16th century via Zelenka and Jomelli in the middle of the 18th through the composers of the Viennese classical school.

György Vashegyi’s new recording of Rameau’s Dardanus superbly demonstrates the Dijon-born composer’s genius, but also the mastery which Vashegyi – with his Orfeo Orchestra and Purcell Choir – has acquired in the music of the Late French Baroque. In conjunction with the preparation of a fresh edition for the Rameau Opera Omnia of the May 1744 version of Dardanus (under the aegis of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles), Vashegyi conducts from a score prepared by the composer (and his librettist Leclerc de La Bruère) following the work’s rejection by Paris Opéra audiences in 1739, with the intention of reinforcing the tragédie’s dramatic action.

In Jepht by Michel Pignolet de Montclair, Gyrgy Vashegyi directs with style and energy another riveting account of a neglected French Baroque opera. The work, based on the Biblical tale of a conquering general obliged, by a sacred vow, to sacrifice his own kin, became an immediate success in 1732, indeed a fixture in opera life in France, receiving over a hundred performances at the Opra alone in the three decades following its premire. Montclair and his librettist Pellegrin were open to preparing revised versions of the opera and it is the third and conclusive edition which has been worked on by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and recorded by Vashegyi and his musicians.

The remarkable Hypermnestre by Charles-Hubert Gervais is the latest unremembered early 18th-century French opera to be recorded afresh for Glossa, and conducted by György Vashegyi.