If there is one Mendelssohn symphonic recording that makes the case for a more favorable reassessment [of the composer], it's this pairing of the Italian Symphony and some of the Midsummer Night's Dream music by Sir Charles Mackerras…. The clarity of texture here [in the Symphony] is extraordinary, even when the brass and winds add their clout. As a result, every line of Mendelssohn's orchestration comes through clearly, leaving a listener with a renewed respect for this composer's inventiveness…. The Midsummer Night's Dream music is even more miraculous….

The abundant legacy of Gustav Leonhardt’s recordings for Telefunken’s Das Alte Werk series invites us to follow his trajectory as a performer from the early 1960’s onwards, a time when the new codes of early music had yet to be invented, when their success depended above all on the strength of conviction of the performer. Leonhardt’s was strengthened by dialogue: with a range of partners whose variety defies all preconceived ideas, with ancient instruments or modern copies of all types, with repertoires as diverse as Byrd, Purcell, Rameau, Johann Sebastian but also Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Not forgetting the 1970 Monteverdi LP, which has never been reissued since. The image of a pope of early music isolated in his tower and frozen in a school style does not last long after listening to this historical sum, extended here by the later series of recordings under the Virgin Veritas flag.

Chandos’ featured release is a new recording of the first English operatic masterpiece, Purcell’s tragedy Dido and Aeneas. Starring Sarah Connolly, Gerald Finley, with the Orchestra and Choir of the Age of Enlightenment, it is released to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Purcell’s birth.

Bach’s music society, the Collegium Musicum of Leipzig (founded 1702, by none other than G.P.Telemann), often met for coffee at the coffee house of Gottfried Zimmermann, also frequently attended by professional musicians and university students. Ah, some things in this world don’t change at all. The drinking was naturally accompanied with music. These were divided between small-scale pieces such as harpsichord concertos and chamber pieces, and large-scale open-air festive cantatas held outside the house. Sounds kinda more engaging than piped radio music.

Compact disc buyers who purchased Andreas Scholl's disc of Handel arias on Harmonia Mundi barely a month before HEROES was released may wonder why they might need the present recital, with its further helping of Handel. One listen will stop the wondering! The key is the non-Handel portion of the program. That Scholl is excellent in baroque music is well-established by his recordings for Harmonia Mundi. But with selections by Hasse, Gluck, and a young Mozart, he demonstrates his talent for later music as well.

Mozart's genius in setting to music Da Ponte's comic play of love, infidelity and forgiveness marks Così fan tutte as one of the great works of art from the Age of Enlightenment. Nicholas Hytner's beautiful production for the Glyndebourne Festival in 2006, with its sure touch and theatrical know-how, lives up to its promise to be 'shockingly traditional', while Iván Fischer teases artful performances from an outstanding international cast of convincing young lovers.

‘Has there ever been a composer of more consistent elegance?’ If Steven Isserlis’s rhetorical question invites the listener to think of plausible alternatives, on the evidence of this wonderful album—an imaginative selection of Boccherini’s cello concertos and cello-centric chamber music—they are most unlikely to succeed. This is truly ‘music of the angels’, with performances to match.

Magdalena Kožená's first all-Mozart album–and her first album in collaboration with partner Sir Simon Rattle–stands out as one of the highlights of 2006's Mozart Anniversary celebrations. Magdalena is a natural Mozart singer, garnering rave reviews and enchanting audiences wherever she performs Mozart on stage. Recent performances in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Berkeley and New York (Carnegie Hall) have brought her glowing praise.

Pure delight: two of Britain’s most exciting singers together with one of the most vibrant of the English period bands, in a collection of wonderful duets from Händel’s English oratorios and odes. Both Carolyn Sampson and Robin Blaze collaborate with Masaaki Suzuki in his recordings of Bach Cantatas, for which they are receiving high praise. ‘Sampson's rounded, lyrical, glowing tone is just what I want to hear in the warm-hearted soprano cantata O holder Tag’ said the critic in International Record Review about BIS-CD-1411, whereas The Times, UK, has described Robin Blaze as being ‘blessed with a most alluring countertenor – creamy in tone, naturally expressive, exquisitely controlled…’.

Rodelinda is a tale of unrequited love steeped in jealousy, treachery and grief. Jean-Marie Villegier's stylish production of Rodelinda sets Handel's tale of royal exile and fidelity in this silent movie era. The composer's ravishing music is perfectly set off by the sophisticated glamour and visual daring that characterized the birth of cinema.

Imelda de'Lambertazzi (1830) was written just before Donizetti's first great international success, Anna Bolena, and it remains one of his many operas that has never made it into the repertoire. In his illuminating program notes, Jeremy Commons argues that Imelda was probably Donizetti's most forward-looking, even avant-garde opera; the composer was determined to create music that matched the demands of the drama, and therefore ignored many of the operatic conventions audiences had come to expect. It's no surprise, then, that it was badly received, and has rarely been revived.

Although frequently classified as an oratorio, C. P. E. Bach's Auferstehung und Himmeelfahrt Jesu is really a cantata. There are no named dramatis personae and it is evident from Emanuel Bach's own comments that he intended the work to have a partly didactic function. He also considered it, in his own words as "pre-eminent among all my vocal works in expression and in the composition". The author of the text was Karl Wilhelm Ramler, an important poet of the German Enlightenment whose texts had earlier attracted Telemann. Ramler and Bach engaged in a close collaboration over the Auferstehung and between Bach's setting of it in 1774 and the eventual publication by Breitkopf in 1787, composer and poet entered into a lively correspondence concerning the details and shape of the cantata. The first performance took place in Hamburg in 1778 when it was warmly received. Many subsequent performances were given culminating in three directed by Mozart in Vienna.

After a fine Handel recital CD, not to mention taking part in a dozen other major recordings, countertenor David Daniels has hit the jackpot. This fascinating, handsomely recorded CD offers us arias from Mitridate and Ascanio in Alba, and a concert aria by Mozart (the only one he composed for male alto), as well as some Handel and Gluck arias. With them, Daniels takes us through every quality a classically trained singer should have and comes through with flying colors. The arias are about vengeance, sorrow, love–the usual–but within baroque strictures that means that some require lush, limpid singing, others ferocious coloratura and exclamatory heft, and some all of these.

If you think you've heard Handel's "Ombra mai fu" (known as his "Largo") so often, and in so many different arrangements, and sung by so many different voices, that you can no longer be moved or surprised by it, think again. This CD of Handel arias, mostly from his Theodora or the cantata La Lucrezia, ends with "Ombra mai fu," and as sung by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, it is so tender, so beautiful, so impeccably shaded, that you'll think you're hearing it for the first time. But that's only four of this disc's 67 minutes–-a follow-up to Hunt Lieberson's extraordinarily successful CD of Bach cantatas. There's not a dull or disinterested moment to be heard anywhere. As the violated Lucrezia, Hunt Lieberson alternately rages against the man who raped her and turns her grief inward; the former is terrifying in its intensity, the latter makes us almost feel as if we're eavesdropping.