There is no complete surviving score for Vivaldi's Ercole su'l Termodonte, but there is enough existing material that modern scholars have been able to reconstruct it primarily by making new settings of the lost recitatives. The first production of the opera since Vivaldi's time was at Spoleto in 2006 in a version by Alessandro Ciccolini, which was released as a DVD. Conductor Fabio Biondi made a version introduced in Venice in 2007, which is recorded on this 2010 Virgin CD. Biondi's recording has the advantage of two international superstars in the leading roles, tenor Rolando Villazón and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, and soprano Diana Damrau is nearly in their league. Villazón's earthy voice is usually associated with 19th century and verismo Italian repertoire, but he has an acute sensitivity to Baroque vocal style, and his robust, almost baritonal tenor is entirely appropriate for a larger-than-life character like Hercules.

The first joint album from countertenor Philippe Jaroussky and guitarist Thibaut Garcia, À sa guitare takes it's name from a song by the 20th century French composer Francis Poulenc. But it's frame of reference is extraordinarily wide - both culturally and stylistically. It's 22 tracks range across 400 years and music by composers and songwriters from France, Britain, Austria, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Argentina and the USA. "The album is a journey between different cultures, different continents and different languages," says Philippe Jaroussky, "but each piece is a world in itself. The idea was to take some risks… sometimes moving to a completely different world between one track and the next." "We can evoke hugely different colours as we juggle between renaissance music and a song by Barbara," explains Thibaut Garcia. "It's our job to play with a palette of colours to produces something unique… We put a great deal of thought into the album, but we also put our hearts into it."

After the intoxicating heat of Mediterraneo, released in 2013, Christina Pluhar and her ensemble L'Arpeggiata now head to the cooler climes of England with Music for a While, an album based on the haunting, graceful and sometimes deeply moving music of Henry Purcell.

Since founding L'Arpeggiata in 2000 as an early music ensemble, Christina Pluhar has taken it in some directions not usually associated with the rarified world of historically informed performance practice, particularly into the traditions of Southern European folk music and jazz. In Los Pájaros Perdidos: The South American Project, she ventures even further afield into the world of modern Latin American popular song and folk song. She argues persuasively that the Renaissance and Baroque instruments the Spanish introduced to the New World in the 16th and 17th century remained essentially the same, while back in Europe they developed in entirely new directions so that the difference between the sound of an early music ensemble and a popular South American instrumental group is less significant than one might expect.

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.

What a wonderful contrast! Handel’s Dixit Dominus and Bach’s Magnificat represent the two oft-compared composers at Dixit . He had already written two Italian operas, and his career path clearly pointed in that direction. The Dixit is as extravagant as Bach’s Magnificat is controlled. The two pieces are such a good fit that one wonders why they haven’t turned up together more frequently, if, in fact, they have at all.

Betrayal, sorcery and one dazzling aria after the next…Ovid's Queen Niobe of Thebes, who turns to stone when her children are slain by the gods as punishment for her arrogance and pride, is the subject of this forgotten 1688 masterpiece. The Italian composer-priest Agostino Steffani languished in obscurity until the opera was rediscovered recently; the Boston Early Music Festival give its world-premiere studio recording with Karina Gauvin in the psychologically complex title role, and countertenor Phillipe Jaroussky singing 'powerfully and sweetly' (The New York Times) as Niobe's husband Anfione, driven to suicide in the face of family tragedy.

The latest album from Christina Pluhar and her instrumental ensemble L’Arpeggiata sheds new light on the chamber cantatas of 17th century Italian composer, Luigi Rossi. He wrote more than 300 of these works and Christina Pluhar’s new double album includes an impressive number of 21 world premiere recordings, which are the fruit of Christina Pluhar’s research among music manuscripts held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Vatican Library.

Philippe Jaroussky brings his musical and dramatic powers to a programme of music from Italian oratorios of the baroque era, including five arias in world premiere recordings. La vanità del mondo, takes it's name from an oratorio by Pietro Torri and among the other composers are Händel, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Hasse, Fago and Caldara. "I think composers of this period often give of their best when setting the great stories of the Old Testament," says Jaroussky. "And if oratorio stories are more static than opera, they allow for deeper reflection on the place of mankind in the universe. I think that resonates with particular intensity in 2020, a year of pandemic."

Handel’s sparkling opera Partenope reunites countertenor Philippe Jaroussky and soprano Karina Gauvin, who both made such an impact in the recording of Steffani’s rediscovered Niobe – released by Erato in early 2015 and welcomed by Gramophone as “a landmark event”. Every moment of Partenope’s comedy, romance and drama is captured by the dynamic conductor Riccardo Minasi and his ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro.

Is it possible that a recorded performance could be too much of a good thing? Well, such an assessment probably would be unfair to a singer as gifted and in command of such astonishing technical skills as countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, so impressively exhibited on this surprising and thoroughly mesmerizing CD. While you may not have heard of this French singer, he's part of a relatively new group of performers–calling themselves Ensemble Artaserse–who have recently joined to explore their mutual interests in "early 17th-century Italian music". These songs by Benedetto Ferrari provide the perfect medium for Jaroussky's art–and it's quite formidable in both purity of tone and subtlety of expression as well as the near-inhuman technical feats he brandishes as naturally as breathing.

The edition for this premiere recording has been made by Karl Böhmer, who has provided an informative introductory essay, and Oliver Mattern. Gérard Lesne has made something of a speciality of Scarlatti’s music and his lively direction of Sedecia benefits from his fluent handling of dramatic and stylistic aspects of the work… A splendid achievement.

Until it was revived in the late twentieth century, Handel's opera Faramondo was performed just eight times in London in 1738 and then fell into obscurity. According to the conventions of Italian opera of the period, men's roles were often written for women, in spite of the lack of dramatic realism, and the use of castrati was common, so higher voices strongly predominate. Handel wrote the title role, which would have gone to a castrato, usually a male alto, for Cafarelli, who had the range of a mezzo-soprano.

Italian composer Nicola Porpora is mainly a footnote in the history books these days, noted as Haydn's teacher, but in his day he was a rival to Handel and wrote a good deal of music for the celebrated castrato Carlo Broschi, aka, Farinelli. That music is sampled here by the startlingly soprano-like French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, and listeners are likely to feel that it's been unjustly neglected. Jaroussky sounds great, his creamy voice sailing through the mostly tuneful pieces. There are also a few big showpieces of the sort that Renée Fleming and others have recorded on their Baroque aria albums.

No less than five brilliant countertenors – including Max Emanuel Cencic and Philippe Jaroussky – join conductor Diego Fasolis and Concerto Köln for Artaserse by Leonardo Vinci (1690-1730). In early 18th century Italy, the Neapolitan-born composer was one of the brightest stars in opera, and Artaserse is considered his masterpiece.