Cecilia Bartoli recreates the 1828 triumph of the legendary Maria Malibran - original star and dedicatee of Halévy's "tragi-comedy", Clari. Tracing the love of a callow country-girl for a duplicitous Duke, this hugely entertaining and first-ever modern production of Clari proved the overwhelming hit of the Zurich Opera season. Zurich Opera's own period-instrument orchestra, La Scintilla, under Adam Fischer, contribute a thoroughly researched, stylistically and historically well-informed accompaniment, yet without neglecting the liveliness and spirit of Italian opera.

Halevy's Noé is another one of those operas that is rather obscure, but doesn't deserve to be. One may criticise it for the story stretching slightly longer than it needed to be, and occasionally one can tell that it was left incomplete, and the music not having any memorable arias (similar problems with Clari), but the story itself is quite good, after all it is based on the biblical story of Noah and the music is beautiful, it is unmistakably Halevy but Bizet's (who was responsible for completing the opera) style does come through in the orchestration.

After an album of French songs (Néère, Alpha 215) that earned her a Gramophone Award in 2016, Véronique Gens presents her new recital, this time with orchestra, which gives her an opportunity to display the maturity of her ‘Falcon’ soprano, the central tessitura typical of French Romantic opera, which takes its name from Cornélie Falcon, who created the works of Meyerbeer and Halévy staged in the 1830s.