Sacred music written for female singers and instrumentalists of the Ospedali became celebrated during the 18th century. This unique musical tradition became widely famous largely through the works of such notable composers as Vivaldi, Hasse, Porpora and Galuppi, who were active as teachers at the four "Ospedali grandi".

Recording an album of arias written expressly for Farinelli, one of the most legendary castratos of the eighteenth century, is brave; his name invokes a world of superhuman vocal feats, remarkable pathos, and a uniquely strong and brilliant tone that, for obvious anatomical reasons, will not be replicated by modern singers. But that clearly does not scare Vivica Genaux who, along with René Jacobs and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, dives into Farinelli's repertory as if it were her very own. She reveals a voice capable of dizzying speed and agility, and a refreshing ability to find in the highly ornamented, expression-through-excess style that typified opera seria of the time a sincerity and musical integrity that makes a case for its wider exploration.

Following the trend of singers releasing recitals based on the repertoire of great performers of previous centuries – Cecilia Bartoli's tribute to Maria Malibran and Juan Diego Flórez's to Giovanni Battista Rubini, for instance – countertenor Philippe Jaroussky has devoted a CD to the repertoire of eighteenth century castrato Giovanni Carestini, who was a rival of Farinelli's. According to contemporary accounts, Farinelli was the more virtuosic of the two, with a hair-raisingly dazzling coloratura, and Carestini was noted for the beauty and purity of his tone, and his profound musical and dramatic characterizations. The demands of the arias collected here make it clear that Carestini must also have had a fully developed technique, because they require remarkable agility and an awe-inspiring range that essentially encompasses both soprano and contralto registers, as well as great interpretive sensitivity.

This 3CD box unites three recitals that showcase the virtuosity, elegance and expressivity of mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux. Together, the programmes, recorded between 2003 and 2009, offer a survey of the repertoire that has figured most strongly in Genaux’s career – music from the 18th and early 19th centuries by Vivaldi, Handel, Hasse, Rossini and Donizetti. The spectacular recital of arias by Vivaldi, ‘Pyrotechnics’ was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2010.

The rediscovery of the almost forgotten opera seria repertory of the 18th century has led to spectacular aria recitals by stars as big as Renée Fleming as well as a host of European and American specialists. Recordings of entire operas, other than those by Handel, have been a good deal rarer; even Vivaldi hasn't really gotten his due. Now comes this major-label release of an opera by Johann Adolf Hasse, a German composer who conquered Italy (they called him "Il Caro Sassone," the dear Saxon) and married one of the leading sopranos of the age, Faustina Bordoni. Siroe is an adapation of a story also set by Handel, in a slightly different version; the libretto here is by Pietro Metastasio, despite his cancer-evoking name the most famous operatic dramatist of the century.

The contents of this album reflect the operatic music Mozart would have known as a teenager. One of the composers, Christoph Willibald Gluck, is known as a founder of the Classical style in opera; others, including Johann Adolf Hasse, Johann Christian Bach, and Tommaso Traetta, are known mostly to specialists, at least in the operatic field. Listeners who have heard the spectacular arias of the late Baroque popularized by Renée Fleming and others will find the pieces here less virtuosic but more dramatically satisfying, as if the composers and librettists had engaged themselves anew with the ancient Greek stories they were retelling. One might object that annotator Denis Morrier gives short shift to the most important of the librettists, Pietro Metastasio, whose writings remained popular up to Beethoven's time.

The outstanding young countertenor Valer Barna-Sabadus has chosen works by a composer who was highly esteemed in his lifetime, but slipped into oblivion. The artist writes “My aim is to give new life to these works… one that places the individuality of the musical works in the forefront.”
Barna-Sabadus dazzles with the swiftness and surety of his execution. His voice seems to have a higher centre than, say, Andreas Scholl's…The last Didone aria takes more than 11 minutes: an entrancing vocal line above an orchestral simplicity which is often composed of staccato chords, which Barna-Sabadus captivatingly tracing the melodies.

— International Record Review

One of the outstanding composers of his day, Johann Adolph Hasse was seen as possessing “the same qualities of true genius, taste and judgment” as his librettist Pietro Metastasio. Didone abbandonata represents the once hugely popular 18th-century genre of opera seria, exploring the same tragic story as Purcell’s earlier Dido and Aeneas while expanding the heroine’s conflicts between regal duties, love, and helplessness in the face of desertion.

Gérard Lesne has already given us some glorious music by largely forgotten composers such as Galuppi and Jommelli. Now he’s turned to Hasse, little-known in this year of his tercentenary but renowned in the 1700s for his operas and oratorios. A German-born composer of Italianate music, Hasse’s work exemplifies the stylistic transition from late Baroque through galant to early Viennese classicism. His 1742 sacred oratorio I pellegrini al sepolcro di Nostro Signore (The Pilgrims at the Tomb of Our Lord) is operatic in style, its succession of busy, inventive da capo arias impressively sung here by Lesne and his team, though Il Seminario Musicale’s strings can sound dry.

Charles Burney described Johann Adolf Hasse, his contemporary, as ‘the most natural, elegant and judicious composer of vocal music, as well as the most voluminous now alive…’ His output includes 63 operas, but only two are currently recorded, yet inexplicably this is the second Piramo, albeit markedly livelier and with the bonus of its two ballet suites. Schneider’s perceptive booklet note comments that too readily we find such composers immature – ‘almost like Mozart’, rather than excitingly expressive and individual. Here even the subtitle Intermezzo tragico is novel, implying a fusion of two traditions, comic and serious. The music is equally unconventional. Recitatives slip seamlessly into and out of arias, creating a strong sense of dramatic continuity. Colours are imaginative: flutes and bassoons paint a beautiful description of Piramo’s Utopia; natural horns roar rudely as the lion approaches – though he proves a rather likeable beast in his subsequent sinfonia. The performance is excellent. Monoyios, a gentle Tisbe, floats effortlessly in melting vocalises; Schlick’s Piramo contrasts, yet matches in their love duets; while Jochens, the domineering father, confirms in his remarkably jolly suicide aria that the final tragico stage, littered with the corpses of all three characters, is not to be taken too seriously.

-George Pratt

The two Johann Adolf Hasse compositions recorded here are proof of the both high quality of his music and the broad range of styles which he had at his disposal. Once again Hans-Christoph Rademann offers an exemplary interpretation of music from the Court of Dresden, to which he has often dedicated his musical efforts.
“Under the direction of Hans-Christoph Rademann the Dresdner Barockorchester and the superb Chamber Choir bring a homogeneous, lean performance which follows integrally the gesture of the text and provides many moving moments. Thus with its penetrating tone language this live recording brings to life two unjustly forgotten masterworks of the 18th century.”

These recordings were produced in the 1980s by the Radio of the German Democratic Republic from performances given in the historic Catholic Court Church in Dresden.