La virtù de’ strali d’Amore was the first of ten operas Cavalli wrote with librettist Giovanni Faustini. Set in Cyprus, the plot involves enchanted and pastoral elements, love and its thwarting, the counterpointing of Man and God, sorcery, revelation and ultimate resolution, all accomplished in a brilliant series of scenes. A follower of Monteverdi, Cavalli reveals the influence of the older man but also his own pronounced independence. Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante have become one of the most admired partnerships in the history of baroque music performance.

Janowski's unfussy, clearly laid out performances, with the Dresden Staatskapelle on superlative form, may lack the sweep and energy of Solti's, or the compelling beauty of Karajan's, but they still have much to recommend them… Jessye Norman, then at the height of her vocal powers, is a rich-toned Sieglinde.

In collaboration with the Opéra de Nice and with the Ensemble Baroque de Nice, Dynamic releases a Vivaldian rarity, Rosmira Fedele, first staged at Venice’s Teatro Sant’Angelo on 27th January 1738. Written on a libretto by Silvio Stampiglia, Rosmira Fedele is the last opera by Vivaldi that has come down to us. Written three years before the composer’s death, this work heralds the end of one of the most fertile theatrical careers in the history of music.

Star tenor and director Rolando Villazn's staging of La Traviata at the Festspielhaus in Baden Baden is "visually spectacular" (The Huffington Post) and made for "an enthusiastic reception for the premiere" (Stuttgarter Zeitung)! Villazn "proves again his excellent narrating skills on stage" (WDR Klassik). "The setting and opulence of the stage captivates the spectator, as do the stylized costumes designed by Thibault Vancraenenbroeck for circus artists" (Stuttgarter Zeitung). Olga Peretyatko as Violetta delivers "a fantastic portrait of the title role wavering between adolescent joie de vivre, mature insight and anguish" (Stuttgarter Zeitung).

Catone in Utica (1737), written for the Teatro Filarmonico in Verona, is one of Vivaldi’s last operatic masterpieces. Its splendid score, however, has come down to us incomplete: in fact the first of the three acts is missing. With infinite patience, Jean-Claude Malgoire has reconstructed the missing act, realising the recitative passages complying perfectly to Vivaldi’s stylistic idiom and integrating the missing arias with original arias taken from other operas written by the Red Priest. Thus Catone in Utica is at last available, in a world-première recording, in its complete form. This is unquestionably one of the highest moments in Vivaldi’s production of music theatre, a concise and highly efficacious score, rich in coups de théâtre and memorable arias, brought to us now in all its dazzling virtuoso beauty by a formidable singing cast. The recording was made in Turcoing, in France, during the performances given in November 2001 and has all the exciting freshness of a live recording in which the excellence of the performers is underlined by the audience’s enthusiastic applause.

Our first-ever full-length Italian opera recording, Delos’s star-studded current release of Giuseppi Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra promises to make quite a splash among today’s opera fans. As Verdi was entering his glorious “late period” (Otello and Falstaff) he wrote and re-worked much of Simon Boccanegra, a work that he had first tackled in 1857. The opera emerged in 1881 as a powerful masterpiece, although one that has been unfairly neglected, in comparison with Verdi’s other works on that level. So it’s high time for an authoritative new release of an opera that gives glamorous title star Dmitri Hvorostovsky – considered by many to be the world’s greatest Verdi baritone – the chance to record what he calls “…one of the most complex, deepest characters in the whole baritone repertoire.”

The title La Gazza Ladra is translated as ‘The Thieving Magpie’, which as expected is a story based around the theft of some silverwear which a magpie has absconded for its nest, a crime which a servant girl is wrongly accused of. La Gazza Ladra is an "opera semiseria", a genre from Rossini’s time which was used to define a drama with a happy ending in which the innocent victim, unjustly condemned, should be saved from the scaffold at the eleventh hour and the rascal persecutor punished.

When this opera's oratorio was rediscovered in 1928, it was first believed to be composed by Mozart. But in fact it was a piece of the last opera of the Prague composer Josef Myslivecek (1731-1781), with whom Mozart had friendly relations and who indeed was inspired by Myslivecek’s work. This world premiere recording of the opera “Medonte” by the ensemble l’arte del mondo shows imposingly the exceptional skills of this wrongly neglected composer. Recorded live at the Bayer Kulturhaus, Leverkusen.

Of Rossini’s thirty-nine operas Il barbiere di Siviglia is the only one to have remained in the repertoire since its composition. When the composer met Beethoven in Vienna the great man told Rossini to only compose buffa operas like Il Barbiere. Verdi was also a great admirer of the work as he was of Rossini’s opera seria and particularly his William Tell. Il Barbiere was one of the works Rossini squeezed in during his contract as Musical Director of the Royal Theatres at Naples and where he was supposed to present two new works every year.

English-speaking audiences have always found Die Meistersinger to be a life-enhancing celebration of wisdom, art and song. So it proves in David McVicar's production – the first at Glyndebourne – which is updated to the early-19th century of Wagner's childhood. At the centre of a true ensemble cast is Gerald Finley, a 'gleamingly sung', 'eminently believable' Sachs (The Independent on Sunday), supported by the dynamic conducting of Vladimir Jurowski which, like McVicar's production, uses Glyndebourne's special intimacy to bring sharp focus to bear on the subtlety of Wagner's musical and dramatic counterpoint.

On her second PENTATONE album Maria & Maddalena, star soprano Francesca Aspromonte explores the Two Marys in oratorios by Lulier, Bononcini, Leopoldo I d’Asburgo, Caldara, Perti, Handel and Scarlatti, partly in new editions, documenting the extremely bloom of the genre in the years around 1700. She performs these works together with violinist Boris Begelman as well as the seasoned players of I Barocchisti under the baton of the eminent Diego Fasolis. Traditionally seen as two feminine opposites, with far-reaching moral implications, Aspromonte brings the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene together as two beautiful and strong women who turned their lives upside down by making the choice to dedicate themselves completely to an ideal. Her interpretation of these exceptional pieces explores all the emotions of the Two Marys, constituting a fascinating and profoundly moving portrait of what it means to be a woman.

Donizetti's three-act tragic opera Belisario was a resounding success in its day, driven by its composer’s superlative theatrical instinct and his skilful interweaving of intense tragic narrative and emotional pathos. Belisario is betrayed by his wife Antonina, who falsely accuses him of high treason. Belisario is blinded and exiled, with proof of his innocence coming too late, and is mortally wounded during a final military victory. This production was performed and recorded without an audience in Bergamo during the Covid-19 lockdown in November 2020 – a moving performance reflecting a spirit of defiance amidst ruin and darkness.

A daring wife disguises herself in order to be hired as a prison guard and thus rescue her unjustly detained husband: the story of Leonora, taken from the French novel by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, is familiar to us through Beethoven’s only opera.

Les Vêpres Siciliennes is one of Verdi’s misunderstood operas. It is usually presented to audiences today as I vespri Siciliani - that is, in a clumsy and pedestrian Italian translation and as such gives a false representation of Verdi’s original concept. This opera was composed for the Paris Opera to a libretto by Eugene Scribe, one of the greatest poets of the day and Charles Duveyrier. Verdi embraces the French idiom – the musical forms, the orchestration, the vocal writing – with the same grandeur and sense of occasion as Rossini and Meyerbeer before him. Certainly to give an opera in translation is no crime but to continually deprive the public of this particularly beautiful marriage of text and music is close to criminal. This is the third in the Verdi Originals series and this BBC recording of the opera finally restores the original French libretto.