Handel’s Messiah is already very well represented on the market with dozens of existing recordings and new productions appearing at regular intervals. Yet this is a very special version, carefully crafted by the Prague-based Collegium Vocale and Collegium 1704 under the baton of Vaclav Luks, founder of the ensemble and one of the most exciting conductors of the Baroque and Classical repertoire. The fine young singers Giulia Semenzato, Benno Schachtner, Krystian Adam, and Krešimir Stražanac joined the ensembles for two moving live performances in Prague’s Rudolfinum in March 2018, and those performances are now presented here.

The priest Giuseppe Cavallo was Maestro di Canto of the Conservatorio de Santa Maria de Loreto from 1672 until his death in 1684. Otherwise, virtually nothing is known about the composer, and it is only due to the musical archive of the Oratorio di Napoli, a treasure trove of rare scores, that a handful of Cavallo's works survive, including Il Giudizio Universale. This sacred oratorio presents Christ and Saint Michael, a pair of angels, two mortals, and four souls–two damned, two blessed–and begins with Christ commanding the angels to bring on the Last Judgment. What follows is a finely crafted musical drama, except for the confusion caused when the otherwise immaculately presented album fails to reveal which of the seven singers (two sopranos, three tenors, and one bass) is singing which parts.

This magnificent performance is without a doubt among the top two or three Handel opera recordings in the catalog. John Nelson outdoes even the period instrument competition, conducting with a vitality and freshness that sweeps all before it. Kathleen Battle is a great Semele (if listening to this woman sing "Myself I Will Adore" isn't a classic example of typecasting, then what is?). But the real palm must go to Marilyn Horne as the jealous Juno, who simply stops the show with her two arias (she sings Ino as well). A very great recording.

Domenico Gabrielli, unrelated to the more famous Gabrielis (spelled with one "l"), was one of a group of composers specializing in oratorio in the city of Bologna in the second half of the seventeenth century. Though the oratorio tradition was nurtured by the church of Santa Maria di Galliera in that city, some of the music was apparently semi-secular; the work recorded here, S. Sigismondo re di Borgogna (St. Sigismund, King of Burgundy), though its protagonist was eventually canonized, has a blood-and-guts story involving armed conflict, decapitation, and the burial of an entire family in a well. Sigismund was a historical figure, who died in 524, and his story might have been (or might still be) suited to operatic treatment.

With its 2012 release of Handel's Esther, the Dunedin Consort continues its admirable series of recordings of little known or recently reconstructed versions of Baroque oratorios, begun in 2006 with its award-winning Dublin version of Messiah. There have been other reconstructions of the early version of Esther, Handel's first English oratorio, but the impetus behind this one, "the first reconstructable version, 1720" comes from research published in 2010 by musicologist John H. Roberts that clarifies which music reflects Handel's intentions for a private 1720 performance at Cannons, the residence of James Bridges, who became Duke of Chandos, and which was added for its 1732 revival.

There are some works which seem to be suspended in their time. La Damnation de Faust is a visionary project which took decades to become known as a chef-d’oeuvre, firstly in the rest of Europe and then in France, but posthumously. Today it is an emblematic work, built up of anthological pieces fro orchestra and choir and soloists’ aits which remain in our memories. Its interpretation by François-Xavier Roth in concert version enables us to hear this work with force and the audacity of early Berlioz: sombre but brilliant.

The Goossens Messiah, recorded for the first and only time by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus under Sir Thomas Beecham, has stood as a landmark of the classical catalogue for sixty years. Goossens’ richly orchestrated version is set to reach a new audience thanks to Maestro Griffith and DCINY, New York City’s leading promoter of classical music. They gathered at Abbey Road Studios in London in July 2019, to record the work with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and a chorus comprising of sixty members of The Jonathan Griffith Singers, drawn from around the world and sixty members of the National Youth Choir of Great Britain. The new recording has captured the score’s vibrant tone colours in thrilling high-definition sound.

The ‘History of the Joyous and Victorious Resurrection of Our Only Saviour and Redeemer Jesus Christ’, composed by Heinrich Schütz in 1623, is regarded as the first oratorio in the German language. When Schütz had taken up his functions at the Dresden court in 1617, it was the tradition to sing the Resurrection History of his predecessor Scandello at Easter. The new Kapellmeister gave several performances of this work before deciding to compose a new work on the same text.

Glyndebournes Saul stole the summer and had critics raving. The Guardian (****) applauded virtuoso stagecraft from director Barrie Kosky in his debut production there, calling the show a theatrical and musical feast of energetic choruses, surreal choreography and gorgeous singing. For The Independent, which ranked it amongst five top classical and opera performances of 2015, there was no praise too high for the cast. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Ivor Bolton sparkles from the pit with period panache, and designer Katrin Lea Tags exuberant costumes (The Times ****) set the Old Testament story in Handels time, with a witty twinge of the contemporary.

The Florentine Francesco Bartolomeo Conti (1682-1732) was the finest theorbo player in early 18th-century Europe, and spent almost his entire career at the Habsburg court in Vienna. He composed sacred and secular vocal works special enough to warrant the attention of both Bach and Handel. Conti's oratorio David, a setting of a dramatic libretto by Apostolo Zeno, was first performed at Vienna in March 1724. The cast of singers included the tenor Francesco Borosini, soon afterwards a principal cast member for Handel in Tamerlano and Rodelinda (Conti's writing for Borosini descends to a low G, hence the decision here to cast baritone Furio Zanasi as Saul).

Aside from his only opera Fidelio, Beethoven’s general link with the theatre in Vienna came about largely with incidental music or songs to be inserted into the works of other composers—insertion arias. König Stephan was written to celebrate the politically significant opening of a new theatre in Pest, its triumphant mood honouring the ruling Austrian Emperor. Standard-bearer of female heroism Leonore Prohaska is commemorated with a Soldier’s Chorus and a Romance with harp accompaniment. In Friedrich von Matthisson’s poem Opferlied (‘Sacrificial Song’), a young man prays to Zeus to bestow upon him beauty and goodness in youth and old age. Two of Beethoven’s four settings are heard on this wide-ranging programme.

Political and cultural circumstances – depending on whether Lorraine / Lothringen belonged to France or Germany – made Théodore Gouvy a border crosser between these two countries. It was very unusual for a French composer of his generation not to assign a central role to music theater in his oeuvre. His rejection of Wagner's music dramas also made him something of an exception in France. It is true, however, that the oratorio was a key genre within his oeuvre – and the oratorio at least can be counted as a dramatic genre. Gouvy wrote six major oratorio compositions, two based on Nordic subjects and two drawing on ancient tragedies.

Parry’s 1888 oratorio on the Apocryphal tale of an avenging Jewish widow emerges as a worthy successor to Mendelssohn’s Elijah in this gripping world premiere recording with Sarah Fox, Kathryn Rudge and Toby Spence.

Herbert von Karajan recorded between 1966 and 1968 with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and a cast of stars this reference version of 'The Creation' by Joseph Haydn.
After a legendary concert given in 1965 in Salzburg, Herbert von Karajan entered the studio a few months later to record Haydn's masterpiece with the same lead singers, Fritz Wunderlich and Gundula Janowitz. Almost completed in 1966, the recording was abruptly interrupted by the accidental and tragic death of Fritz Wunderlich at the age of 35, on September 17, 1966. The sessions then resume with a young tenor, Werner Krenn, who replaces Wunderlich on the songs. recitatives in particular.

Die Jahreszeiten, or The Seasons, is not as well loved as Haydn's other late oratorio, The Creation; here Haydn tried to force pastoral imagery – by 1801 a set of ideas that had been musically rehashed for centuries – into his late and in many respects proto-Romantic musical language. He resented, he wrote to a correspondent, having to compose "French trash" at one point in the score that called for frog sounds, and the score contains a menagerie of other rustic creatures and sounds – shepherds, shepherdesses, horn calls, birds, trees, bees, herbs, fish, roosters, rifle shots, thunder and lighting, stags, sunrises, and sunsets, among others. Yet the work is a strange mixture of cute and exultant.