In the bicentenary of Paisiello’s death, Catania’s Bellini Theatre staged Fedra, a world premiere performance in modern times of this opera by the composer from Taranto. It was a musical and cultural operation of great interest, which saw the revival – based on the original manuscript and on various transcriptions – of a rich, complex score, and attracted the attention of the Italian and international critics. The French conductor Jérôme Correas, an authority in this repertoire, was on the podium. Fedra had only been performed once in the 20th century for a radio recording and had never been staged in our century before. That single radio recording, however valuable, is however incomplete and, unlike this edition, unfaithful, in many ways, to the original score.

Fabio Bonizzoni, one of Baroque music performance leading conductors of our time, and his group La Risonanza make their debut on Challenge Classics with Dido and Aeneas, Purcell's operatic masterpiece. It is coupled with The Love of Mars and Venus by John Eccles and Gottfried Finger, Purcell's near contemporaries. Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, composed in the 1680s, is arguably the most beloved and best-known opera in English. Bonizzoni says: "The charm of this opera is in that it contains everything, like Cervantes' Don Quixote: any life experience is within it. Love, hate, death, dream, despair, the innocent and the wicked play.

In spite of doom-laden predictions a few years ago that the age of recorded opera was dead, fascinating new discs are being produced, often of obscure rarities – and it would be hard to be more obscure than the operas of Domènec Terradellas, who worked for a while at the King's theatre in London in the mid-1740s but whose music has completely disappeared from view. On the evidence of this lavish and dramatic opera seria for Rome and Barcelona, he was alive to the most modern trends in virtuosic vocal writing without ever quite achieving depth of feeling. Juan Bautista Otero's committed revival with his sparkling Barcelona orchestra includes some dazzling singing, with the honours shared between Alexandrina Pendatchanska's correctvicious Nitocri and Sunhae Im in the title role.

In the third instalment in Fabio Bonizzoni’s survey of the secular cantatas with instrumental accompaniment composed by Georg Frideric Handel during his stay in Italy, come a quartet of works associated with the Venice-born maecenas Pietro Ottoboni – including the substantial Ero e Leandro, the libretto for which is plausibly considered to have been written by the Cardinal Ottoboni himself. As well as the seldom-performed cantata for bass, Spande ancora a mio dispetto and Ah! Crudel, nel pianto mio scored forsoprano solo, Bonizzoni also directs the Spanish-texted Nose emendará jamás.

Now unfairly stigmatised (due to Pushkin and the film Amadeus) as Mozart’s sinister Nemesis, Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) enjoyed the more successful career as an opera composer. His comedy Trofonio’s Cave, written to a clever libretto by Giambattista Casti, was staged at Vienna’s Burgtheater in October 1785, just a few months before Figaro debuted there, and kept its place in the repertory for 30 years. If posterity gave the palm to Mozart, his contemporaries preferred Salieri. And indeed the Italian’s attractive score to this text describing the effects of entering a magic cave upon two pairs of lovers – one quiet and earnest, the other noisy hedonists – is full of good things.

Carlo Agostino Badia was one of the many Italian musicians making his fortune at the court of Vienna where he was hired as a composer in 1694. We have no news about his education, but the musical historiography is mentioning about his great compositional period lasting forty-four years at the service of the emperors Leopold i and Joseph i, in which he produced in large quantities cantatas, melodramas and oratorios greatly appreciated at the Austrian court. From his musical writing it is clear how he was a “ferryer” of that late Baroque (followed by Antonio Caldara who succeeded him at the Viennese court) anticipating the forms of the imminent galant style. In this recording the attention is directed to the profane cantatas, from the collection Tributi Armonici – published in Nuremberg in 1699 – which represent precisely the transition from the traditional style (in particular the Venetian one) to the new eighteenth-century style. The great variety of writing that distinguishes the cantatas is well rendered by the ductile voice of the soprano Raffaella Milanesi accompanied by RomaBarocca Ensemble, under the direction of Lorenzo Tozzi.

This CD from the Real Compañía Ópera de Cámara presents two cantatas by the Spanish composer Vicente Martín y Soler - Il Sogno and La Dora festeggiante. Il Sogno, written in 1787, is the only example of collaboration of between Martín y Soler and the great librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. These works are like a small fresco of this period of transformation. La Dora represents the end of a period, in which the Olympic gods serve as a model to human behavior, while Il Sogno, is, deep down, a pre-romantic spiritual work, in which the nymphs are no longer unattainable beings, beings that do not suffer or have human passions but on the contrary, they embody them, they live them in their own skin in spite of being in an idyllic place.

The peculiar feature of this record is the great variety of the musical styles represented: instrumental and vocal music, very-well known concertos and other less famous ones of different soloists. A release that finds its strength in the specific expressive nature of Vivaldi’s genius that gave cohesiveness to pieces conceived years apart and for different occasions. The brilliant Italian soprano Raffaella Milanesi shares the stage with the soloists of Accademia Ottoboni, an ensemble that performs early music using original period instruments or copies. The ensemble originates from Rome and consists of musicians of the most recent generation active in the international scene.

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.

Universally admired for his keyboard music, the vocal music of Domenico Scarlatti has until very recently been largely ignored. For many years, the opera Tolomeo e Alessandro was known only from a manuscript of Act I in a private collection in Milan. Recently the entire opera turned up in England and surprisingly revealed that Domenico was after all a very fine dramatic composer, perhaps even more appealingly so than his father Alessandro. It is tempting to think that Handel, whose Tolomeo uses the same libretto, may have known this setting by his old friend, 'Mimmo', and tried to outdo him in setting the same texts to music. He was not always successful.

Mozart's affectionate quotation from Martín y Soler's Una cosa rara in the Don Giovanni dinner music suggests he admired his Spanish contemporary, whose music was praised by others as 'sweet' and 'graceful'. Such descriptions remain apt for a charming and brilliantly executed performance that's essential for anybody curious about late 18th-century opera beyond Mozart.

The opera is starring countertenor Valer Sabadus - one of opera's most exciting newcomers - now exclusively signed to Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, a division of Sony Classical. Christoph Willibald Gluck, widely known for fundamentally reforming the 'opera seria' wrote some of the greatest and exemplary masterpieces of this great genre before he started his famous reform of the opera. This makes this work a fascinating and enlightening piece in the puzzle for the evolution of opera and the eminent character Gluck. Gluck's setting of La Clemenza was first performed in Naples in 1752, ten years before his first reform opera.

We often think of Haydn as a composer of symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas – that is, of instrumental music in various forms. But in fact, he probably wrote as much vocal music, in a variety of genres. The late, great oratorios are still justly famous – The Creation and The Seasons – but he also composed twelve large-scale Masses, a number of cantatas and other sacred works, as well as songs, concert arias and as many as 21 operas and Singspiele. Some of these have been lost, but the majority still exist in more or less complete form. The earliest of these is Acide, the fragment of an opera composed for the celebrations of the wedding of Count Anton Esterházy and Countess Maria Theresia Erdödy, and performed at the Esterházy residence at Eisenstadt on 11th January 1763.

The first complete and unabridged recording of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s operatic masterpiece, as well as the world-premiere recording on period instruments, undertaken by the critically acclaimed 2010 production from the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, known as the “Bayreuth of Baroque Opera”. In his all too brief career Pergolesi, who died in 1736 aged only 26, set the course for 18th century opera. His works, especially L’Olimpiade, which was first performed in 1735, introduced a new and sentimental tone to the opera stage. Based on one of the most popular subject matters of opera seria, Pergolesi’s masterpiece L’Olimpiade offers a drama of love and intrigue coupled with highly virtuoso singing. Presenting Italian conductor Alessandro de Marchi, one of the most sought-after Early Music specialists, and a stunning cast of top-league international Baroque singers.

Teuzzone is an early opera, written in 1719, only five years after Vivaldi's first venture into the field. His developing skill as an opera composer is evident in the music's vivid delineation of the characters and their moods. There isn't much of a dramatic arc to the music of the three acts, but for the listener willing to forego that expectation, the individual moments are wonderfully effective and engaging. The libretto features the standard late Baroque operatic themes of thwarted romance and court intrigue, but it takes place in China, perhaps the first libretto to be set in the Far East. Jordi Savall had led Le Concert des Nations in one previous Vivaldi opera, Farnace, recorded live in 2001. In this 2011 studio recording, the sound quality is considerably better, and the performances are consistently superb.