Bella Ciao Diego Moreno

With a capaciously-filled boxset of a dozen CDs made up of attractive individual programmes and entitled The Spanish Guitar, Glossa reintroduces the superb playing of José Miguel Moreno. And with recordings from 1991-2004 which still sound fresh and vivid today. A new essay and all the sung texts are included in the physical booklet that completes this limited-edition set.

Songs of love and loss by a trio of early 18th century Spanish composers, showcasing the vocal art of a distinguished early-music soprano.

The last decade or so has seen the blossoming of a new generation of vocal talents from Spain, many of whom have been expressing their art through early music. A leading figure in this artistic array has been the soprano Nuria Rial, a singer blessed with an unaffected declamatory style, sweet and yet intimate in its emotional charm. In recent years the career of Rial has seen her tackle with success music by Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, as well as Pergolesi and much Italian seicento repertoire. This newly-prepared Glossa album turns the clock back to collect together recordings made by the fresh voice of the Catalonian soprano in the years immediately following her studies at the Musik-Akademie in Basel.

A signal moment in the arrival of Italian music on Spanish soil came in the summer of 1708 when Antonio Caldara, finding his opportunities for providing dramatic works for the opera-loving Duke of Mantua limited by the War of the Spanish Succession, headed off to Barcelona to take on acommission for putting on an operatic work from Archduke Charles (“Carlos III”), who was preparing his own wedding festivities at the court he had established in order to contend for the Spanish throne.

The repertory of the Spanish vihuela from the 16th century remains little investigated, partly because few original instruments exist; when vihuela works appear on recordings they are often played on the lute or guitar. This is a shame, for the instrument has its own sound and a repertory (albeit one that often claimed playability on various instruments) that exploited that sound. The vihuela is large, with six pairs of strings running up a large body and long neck, and the music on this album exploits the instrument's rich sonority and capability for ornamentation rather than the rapid runs, called redobles in Spanish, that are characteristic of music for other plucked stringed instruments.

During the course of an extraordinarily active life and compositional career Niccolò Piccinni embraced not only both comic and serious Italian opera but also, during the course of a 15-year period spent in Paris (1776–1791), adapted his style to tragédie lyrique, thereby becoming an unwitting participant in the rows between his adherents and those of Gluck. Like most 18th-century Neapolitan composers (he was actually born in Bari), Piccinni was a product of the conservatoire system, following which he gained his first operatic successes during the 1750s. In 1758 he broke into wider prominence with Alessandro nelle Indie, an opera seria given in Rome with such success that the composer moved there, embarking on a period of intense operatic activity that reached an early peak with the production in 1761 of his most famous opera, La buona figliuola.

Star countertenor Philippe Jaroussky continues his exploration of operatic settings of the Orpheus myth with the most famous of the many operas inspired by the story of the Greek poet who searches for his dead wife in the Underworld: Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice. It contains one of the world's best-loved operatic arias, Orfeo's restrained, but moving lament, 'Che farò senza Euridice'.

With Philippe Jaroussky’s new album, Storia di Orfeo, the French countertenor realises a long-held dream: to portray the mythic Orpheus – divine musician who ventures into the underworld to retrieve his beloved wife Eurydice from the clutches of death – in his many guises, an inspiration for the very first opera and beyond.

Motéma Music, now celebrating its 20th year as one of the world’s premier jazz/world labels, will release FlamenKora, a self-titled debut album from a new trio that unites West African Mande music with authentic Spanish flamenco guitar and American and Euro jazz trumpet to create a transglobal collaboration unlike any other. FlamenKora features German-born, New York-based trumpeter Volker Goetze, Senegalese-born, Paris-based kora master and vocalist Ali Boulo Santo Cissoko, and the rising Madrid flamenco guitar sensation, Alejandro Moreno. Following a series of sold-out shows in Europe, FlamenKora will introduce their cross-genre global music to the masses with their Motéma release on Friday, June 9th, 2023.