Sony Classical continues its major Mozart opera project with conductor Teodor Currentzis and his orchestra & choir MusicAeterna. A ‘no-compromise’ studio recording cycle of Mozart’s three Da Ponte operas. Living in a unique artistic community established on the edge of Siberia, the musicians work and record under ideal conditions towards Currentzis’ stated goal “to show what can be achieved if you avoid the factory approach of the classical music mainstream”. The soloists’ vocal technique is also markedly different to modern operatic interpretation, with a focus on intimacy and clarity, a use of vibrato remarkably restrictive even by today’s ‘period practice’ standards as well as an approach to melodic ornamentation derived from historic sources which cannot be heard in other performances of these works.

Bianca e Falliero was commissioned by La Scala, Milan, for its prestigious Carnival season of 1819–20, enjoying a run of no fewer than 39 performances. Rossini responded with a score the virtuosity and expressivity of which outdid even his Neapolitan works. Prevailing tastes at La Scala meant that ensembles predominated over arias but behind the conventional dictates Rossini lavished the utmost care on his work, fashioning an opera full of dramatic coloratura and powerful theatrical craft and notable for its rich and often surprising use of harmony.

Judas Maccabäus is one of Handel’s most impressive and successful works. More than 50 performances took place in Handel’s lifetime. The integration of the libretto with the conflict between the Scottish Jacobites under the leadership of the catholic Stuart pretender Charles Edward and the royalist government troops played a crucial role in this. The original libretto tells the story of the struggle of the Jews against the rule of the Seleucids. Handel portrays the plot with colourful arias, touching laments and exultant triumph choruses.

La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) marked a culmination of the convergence of serious and comic elements in Rossini’s work. The result is an ideal hybrid: a tragic opera with a happy ending that rises to the status of true opera seria. With its outstanding dramatic and musical qualities it remains one of Rossini’s greatest and most successful operas, a constant presence in the repertoire since its triumphant 1817 première in Milan. This performance is conducted by Alberto Zedda, who made his conducting début in 1956, produced the first critical edition of La gazza ladra, and is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the operas of Rossini.

The epic tale of the fall of Troy haunted Berlioz from childhood and inspired some of his most passionately dramatic, richly colorful music. This is Colin Davis's second recording of Les Troyens, following his (out-of-print) 1969 version. Magnificent though it was, some reckoned that reading lacked something in zip. Here, however, such reservations could never apply. Recorded across several lavishly praised concert performances in London in December 2000, this Troyens has an extraordinary electricity and rhythmic drive.

In spite of doom-laden predictions a few years ago that the age of recorded opera was dead, fascinating new discs are being produced, often of obscure rarities – and it would be hard to be more obscure than the operas of Domènec Terradellas, who worked for a while at the King's theatre in London in the mid-1740s but whose music has completely disappeared from view. On the evidence of this lavish and dramatic opera seria for Rome and Barcelona, he was alive to the most modern trends in virtuosic vocal writing without ever quite achieving depth of feeling. Juan Bautista Otero's committed revival with his sparkling Barcelona orchestra includes some dazzling singing, with the honours shared between Alexandrina Pendatchanska's correctvicious Nitocri and Sunhae Im in the title role.

Composed for the coronation of Charles X in Rheims Cathedral, this pièce de circonstance was to remain Rossini's last Italian opera. It contains some of the most inspired and brilliant vocal writing the composer ever produced. Most experts and analysts agree that this is an unconventinal opera, light and ironic, festive and exuberant, with a plot as simple as it is extrvagant, a work full of musical references which almost turn it, very subtly, into a "metaopera," or an "opera about opera."