Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques have done an immeasurable service to the revival of Baroque opera in modern times; of their superb 1996 set of Niccolò Jommelli's Armida Abbondata for FNAC it can be said that its entry into the recorded repertoire raised the bar on historically informed performances of this kind of material. Now ...
Marin Marais (1656-1728), the subject of the popular 1991 film Tous les matins du monde, is best known today for his music for gamba, but he was prolific in a variety of genres and wrote some of the most important French operas between Lully and Rameau. Because of its dramatic weakness, Sémélé (1709) was not among his most successful works, but ...
Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter first reached an international audience as part of the cast of Georg Solti's recordings of Bach's St. Matthew Passion and B minor Mass in the early '90s. Since then, however, von Otter has stayed away from Bach, preferring to explore a wide range of more recent repertoire from Mozart through Brahms to ...
For musical fun from the gran siècle -- that wonderful period in the early eighteenth century when Louis XIV created his own personal pleasure palace in Versailles -- try this 2008 Naïve disc called Les Grandes Eaux Musicales de Versailles. With a program featuring selected works written for the king by Lully, Rameau, Desmarest, Gluck, and ...
Arguably, Haydn's best opera isn't an opera at all. The oratorio Il ritorno di Tobia, Hob. 21/1, composed in 1775 and recorded here with two choruses added in 1784, is putatively a sacred work, drawing on the biblical (at least for Catholics and the Orthodox) Book of Tobit. But the narrative, featuring the return of a prodigal son, a fish-liver ...
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