This is an excellent and varied selection of composers from the very well known like Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach and Vivaldi, through the less famous but familiar like Frescobaldi, Sainte-Colombe and Zelenka, to the downright obscure. It is all delightful: the musicians are uniformly excellent, and include such great names as Gustav Leonhardt, Cantus Colln, Christopher Hogwood and so on. They give fine performances both of the familiar works and of the less familiar ones. Obviously there will be discs you like more than others and you may already have favourite versions of some works, but these discs are never less than very good and are often outstanding.

Monteverdi's seminal first opera tells the dramatic story from Ovid's Metamorphoses of the descent of Orfeo (Georg Nigl) into the underworld to recover his beloved wife Euridice (Roberta Invernizzi), who has died from a snake bite. In a new production for La Scala, based on a painting by Titian and directed by Robert Wilson, the opera receives a powerful and inspiring performance from a fine cast, the Orchestra of Teatro alla Scala and Concerto Italiano under the much-admired Italian early music specialist, Rinaldo Alessandrini. Filmed in High Definition and recorded in true surround sound.

The virtuoso Venetian diva of the 17th century, Barbara Strozzi, Monteverdi's heiress, journeys the passions of the soul through a daring mosaic of styles and rhythms. Leonardo Garcia Alarcon, who is one of the rising generation of baroque conductors, is leading a major research project on the specific parameters which make up musical performance, paying particular attention to improvisation techniques and the relationship between text and music. His work at the Ambronay Festival has focused on the performance of 17th-century Italian music including rich and little-known repertoire of motets and madrigals by Barbara Strozzi, Isabella Leonarda and Antonia Bembo.

Claudio Monteverdi's Seventh Book of Madrigals have been recorded well by several early music groups, but one expects superior readings from harpsichordist Rinaldo Alessandrini and his vocal-instrumental ensemble Concerto Italiano, and indeed, one gets them here. Alessandrini's versions are on the spare side, with seven voices and an instrumental ensemble of 13 that includes three continuo instruments plus percussion, with Alessandrini's harpsichord prominent in the mix, but he has all the equipment he needs to deliver a really distinctive "concerto," as the title of the Seventh Book boldly proclaims itself. With this book, Monteverdi moved decisively away from the old polyphonic madrigal ideal and toward the text-based settings that would be the norm for vocal music over the next four centuries and counting.

The work was produced with the Virtual Stage system, the innovative method that features new blended methods, between real and virtual, between philology and technology, applied to the operatic setting for both audio and scene through multitrack recording. The voice cast consists of young talents headed by virtuoso tenor Leonardo De Lisi as Ulysses. The ensemble instrumental sees musicians prominent of the group Dutch Heliosphere, together with the flautist Marco Di Manno co-founder of the Ensemble, Dimitri Betti assistant to the continuo players musician and harpsichordist and Giacomo Benedetti on the organ, with the participation of the Juvenes Cantores choir of the Cathedral of Sarzana by Alessandra Montali.

Monteverdi's great opera is a celebration of unwavering devotion, conveyed in some of the composers most poignant, heart-breaking music. After two brutal decades of war, the weary Ulysses is washed up on the rocky shore of his home island of Ithaca. There, he discovers the hordes of depraved admirers who have beseiged his faithful wife Penelope in his 20-year absence and launches into battle to win back her love. Monteverdi's opera is a celebration of unwavering devotion, conveyed in some of the composers most poignant, heartbreaking music. Sir John Eliot Gardiner leads an exemplary cast of world-class singers alongside the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in this live recording from The National Forum of Music in Wrocaw, Poland part of their critically acclaimed Monteverdi 450 tour in 2017.

Les Castrats furent les premières « stars » de l'histoire de la musique. Ils tenaient souvent le rôle-titre (et à Rome tous les rôles féminins des opéras), créant sur le plateau une véritable compétition de virtuosité et d'émotion entre les chanteurs, dont le public était l'arbitre par ses demandes de bis. Et si trois des meilleurs interprètes de notre temps faisaient eux aussi ce Concours de Virtuosité ? Voici Valer Sabadus (Arad, 1986), Filippo Mineccia (Florence, 1981), et Samuel Mariño (Caracas, 1993). Airs virtuoses, duos d'amour et trios combatifs faisaient triompher les Castrats : à chacun de trouver son vainqueur !

Dedicating an album to the dark side of the Lied might seem inappropriate in these times of Covid, climate change and refugee crises, but as a mezzo-soprano Olivia has always been drawn to the darker roles in opera, the sad arias in oratorio and the deep laments in song. After our recent recording ('Dirty Minds'), which focused on 'la petite mort', it seemed a natural progression to turn our attention to 'la grande mort'! Darkness in the outside world and the inner self has always been - alongside Love - one of the chief themes of vocal music, and compositions and songs about death are legion during every period of musical history.

“This large-scale live recording (Gardiner's second) was made in Venice's St Mark's Basilica. It captures the drama as well as the ceremonial aspect of the work, despite sometimes cloudy recorded sound.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide. “Gardiner's second [recording of the Vespers], spectacularly recorded live in St Mark's, has a punchy choral sound, near-operatic solo singing (Bryn Terfel and Alistair Miles are among the basses), emphatic enunciation, big contrasts and deliberate exploitation of the building's spaces. Its outright theatricality sets it apart from other performances.” Gramophone Magazine.

As part of their comprehensive survey of the music of Claudio Monteverdi, Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana delivered an exceptional version of L’Orfeo, a reading which had been honed by their trailblazing interpretations of the composer’s madrigals. This highly-esteemed recording of the favola in musica – critics applauded and fêted it in many different countries – subsequently dropped out of the catalogue and Glossa is very pleased to have the opportunity to return it there as part of this year’s 450th anniversary commemorations of the composer’s birth.

This disc constitutes the memoir of the concerti of Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin) of Claudio Monteverdi which took place in Palermo in the church of Santa Maria dello Spasimo from the 15th - 17th July 1999 for the occasion of the musical summer (Estate Musicale) of the Teatro Massimo (Fondazione Teatro Massimo). The concerti were carried out by the Teatro Massimo and the regional arts delegation for the town of Palermo in collaboration with the Association for Ancient Music Antonio Il Verso and the Institute of Music History of the University of Palermo. 'Could we have dreamt such glorious music-making was possible? This version has genuine impact, and goes straight to the top of the list of recommended recordings. Monteverdi, or the Vespers of the Blessed Garrido.' Repertoire '…this luminous vision constitutes one of the finest chapters in the history of modern Monteverdi interpretation.' –Le monde de la musique.

This is the second disc to come from Paul McCreesh and his Gabrieli forces and it is already their second Gramophone Award. When I reviewed their Virgin Classics' recording of a reconstruction of a dogal coronation of 1595 (5/90) I admired their stylish blend of informed scholarship and sensitive musicianship allied to performances from musicians well-versed in the language of the period. Added to that the music was recorded with great immediacy in the acoustically impressive surroundings of Brinkburn Priory in Northumberland. For this reconstruction of a Vespers that could have be held in St Mark's, Venice McCreesh shows a real understanding of the placing and choreography of the participants in the musical aspects of the liturgy.

The culmination of a three-year Monteverdi project led by conductor William Christie and director Pier Luigi Pizzi at Madrid's Teatro Réal, L'incoronazione di Poppea brings a potent blend of sex and politics, high drama and comedy. Leading the cast are Danielle de Niese, Philippe Jaroussky, Max Emanuel Cencic and Anna Bonitatibus.

Monteverdi was only 23 when he published his Second Book of Madrigals in 1590, but he was already a master of the form, and these contrapuntally lively pieces, with their supple and astute text setting, are crowning works of late Renaissance secular polyphony. With this release of the Second Book, Rinaldo Alessandrini moves closer to his goal of recording all of Monteverdi's eight Books of Madrigals, performed by Concerto Italiano, the ensemble he founded in 1984. The series has received much-deserved critical acclaim; three of the releases won Gramophone Awards, and this 1994 recording won a Diapason d'Or. Concerto Italiano is a group whose roster is flexible, based on the requirements of the music performed, and here seven unaccompanied singers configure themselves in a variety of combinations in the five-part madrigals.

The style of Italian early music conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini and his Concerto Italiano might be described as both strongly expressive and highly intelligent. Consider this recording of Monteverdi's Sixth Book of Madrigals, pieces that hover between the older polyphonic madrigal tradition and the newer, essentially soloistic and dramatic language of opera. The texts of these mostly five-part pieces focus almost exclusively on extremely melancholy depictions of mourning for love lost, mostly through death – something Alessandrini in his detailed and highly informative notes attributes to the death of Monteverdi's wife and his favorite female student shortly before the music was composed. Alessandrini takes the ideal of text expression as paramount, downplaying larger formal details in favor of a sequence of extremely intense moments.