Wild, passionate, and over in less than an hour, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas is one of the greatest operas ever composed and it has received some of the greatest performances of any opera ever recorded. And while some of them have been sung with more refinement or more fervor, few can match this performance with Susan Graham as Dido and Ian ...
Naïve continues its admirable series of complete recordings of Vivaldi's operas with Atenaide, an opera seria that was not successful at its 1728 premiere, and received no further performances during the composer's lifetime. This recording was made as a result of the first modern production, which was presented in the same Florentine theater in ...
With this exciting release, Fabio Biondi, the outstanding Europa Galante, and a cast led by stars Véronique Gens and Vivica Genaux strike a decisive blow for Alessandro Scarlatti's obscure Oratorio per la Santissima Trinità. Old-fashioned even in its day, the work is a musicalized instructional debate about the mysteries of the Holy Trinity ...
With this set of 12 cantatas, a few of them quite short, Dutch historical-instrument conductor Ton Koopman approaches the end of his monumental traversal of the complete Bach cantata corpus. The cantatas here mostly date from the last two decades of Bach's life. By this time Bach had cantatas from earlier cycles ready for most occasions pertaining ...
Conductor John Eliot Gardiner, said England's Independent newspaper, "has had the last laugh" -- Vol. 1 of his Bach cantata series was named Record of the Year at the 2005 Classic FM Gramophone Awards in London, after the big Deutsche Grammophon label pulled out of the project and dropped Gardiner just before it got underway in 2000. No doubt a ...
With one singer to a part and very sparing use of continuo, this 2006 Virgin recording of Divine Hymns by Henry Purcell, William Croft, John Blow, and Pelham Humfrey is both lively and severe. Performed by Les Arts Florissants under the direction of William Christie, the works here express a huge emotional range, and the singers -- tenor Paul ...
Bright, fast, and vivacious, Paul McCreesh's performances of Bach's Easter Oratorio and Magnificat may sometimes seem to skimp on the sacred, but they more than compensate with a big dose of the secular. This is not to say that his 2000 Archiv recording is entirely lacking the spiritual -- some of the more melancholy arias touch the infinite, try ...
The pairing of the Australian-British-American Percy Grainger, whose brief works drew heavily on the folk songs of those countries, with the hefty late Romanticism of Norway's Edvard Grieg, seems odd at first. But the two met and spent considerable time together in the months before Grieg's death in 1907, and Grainger later championed the Four ...
Naïve's Aria d'Opera dal fondo Foà 28 gathers a number of singers in performances of pieces taken from the National Library of Turin's Vivaldi manuscript identified by its shelfmark as "Foà 28." This manuscript, assembled by Antonio Vivaldi himself, is a collection of 47 arias and ensemble pieces taken from various operas; it is so obscure that ...
Mozart's "Great Mass" in C minor, K. 427, has traditionally been given lush performances that follow from its nickname, presumably attached during the Romantic era. This fragmentary work juxtaposes expansive, operatic arias with one of the first large-scale results of the experimentation with Baroque-style counterpoint that occupied Mozart during ...
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