Cherubini

La clarinette, instrument de prédilection de Mozart lui a inspiré deux partitions de chambre exceptionnelles, dont "Le Trio des quilles". La légende veut que Mozart l'ait conçu pendant qu'il jouait aux quilles avec quelques amis. Dans cette oeuvre, on atteint la plus haute conception de la musique de chambre : un équilibre parfait entre les parties, une grande homogénéité de timbres. Cette version interprétée par des artistes de renommée internationale est vraiment très expressive.

Composed in 1783, Thrice Betrothed, Never Wed was the young Cherubini’s fifth opera and his first opera buffa. While it echoes its era—Paisiello, Cimarosa, Haydn, and early Mozart—it displays an almost Rossinian rhythmic bite and a few harmonic touches that look forward to the dramatic masterpieces of Cherubini’s Paris years (Lodoiska, Medée, Les deux journées, Anacréon, the C-Minor Requiem). Despite decades-long exploration of Cherubini, I have never encountered the opera before; this claims to be its first recording. The plot is filled with the expected inanities: disguises, mistaken identities, and Commedia dell’arte shenanigans.

This 10 CD-Set offers a collection of the most popular Mass compositions from the Viennese Classics up to the romantic period. It includes famous masterpieces like Mozart’s „Coronation Mass“, Beethoven Missa solemnis, Haydn „Harmony Mass“, Gounod St. Cecilia Mass but also rarities like „Missa Sancti Joannis Nepomuceni“ by Michael Haydn, the „Coronation Mass“ by Cherubini, „Missa sacra“ by Robert Schumann and the „Misa solemnis“ of the german romantic composer Friedrich Kiel. Performed by well known artists like the Vienna Boys’ Choir, RIAS Chamber Choir, Tölzer Boys’ Choir, Wiener Akademie and last but not least also includes the spectacular recording of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis with conductor Michael Gielen.

Acclaimed mezzo-soprano Mary-Ellen Nesi presents thirteen arias most of them recorded here for the first time inspired by ten Greek female archetypes. George Petrou and the brilliant Armonia Atenea add fire to this exciting collection of 18th-century masterpieces. MDG listeners will be familiar with Mary-Ellen Nesi from several outstanding Handel recordings. In her most recent recital the acclaimed mezzo-soprano turns to dramatic roles from Baroque and classical operas.

“…Riccardo Muti conducts Don Pasquale in Ravenna - a great celebration for everyone.” This press quote from the Italian music magazine Il giornale della musica hit the mark exactly. Watching this realistic, young and vital production, directed by the 21 year old Andrea da Rosa and listening to a high potential and unspent young cast, you feel how powerful, charming and timeless this score by Donizetti is. This production was recorded during the Ravenna Festival in the gorgeous and patriarchal Teatro Dante Alighieri, in December 2006. Maestro Riccardo Muti shows one more time, what it means to perform an Italian opera with a young and professional Italian cast – an outstanding and breathtaking performance and really, "a great celebration for everyone".

In 1824, while waiting for the the ninth symphony it commissioned from Beethoven, the Philharmonic Society of London ordered a backup symphony in D major from the Italian-turned-French composer Luigi Cherubini. The Society had been founded ten years earlier to perform music by ‘the greatest masters’, notably Beethoven, Cherubini and Carl Maria von Weber.

Faniska is an opéra comique in three acts by Luigi Cherubini. The German libretto, by Joseph Sonnleithner, is based on the melodrama Les mines de Pologne (1803) by René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt.

At the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France in 1815, tributes to the executed Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were frequently offered, and two of the most important compositions used for their belated memorials were Luigi Cherubini's Requiem in C minor and Charles-Henri Plantade's Messe des morts in D minor. Cherubini's work was performed at a ceremony in 1816, shortly after the monarchs' remains had been moved to the royal crypt in St. Denis, while Plantade's score was revised and performed in 1823 for the thirtieth anniversary of Marie-Antoinette's death.

Riccardo Muti's 2011 performances of Saverio Mercadante's I due Figaro (The Two Figaros) were the first it had received since 1835, and this Ducale release of the presentation at the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna, Italy, is the world-premiere recording. The story of this comic opera is a sequel to events in the Beaumarchais plays, which inspired Rossini's Barber of Seville and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro; the characters of Figaro, Susanna, Cherubino, and the Count and Countess Almaviva are seen a decade later in another farce of disguises and deception. The music is very much in the animated style of Rossini, with an exotic quality that Mercadante discovered on his visit to Madrid, and the mood of the opera is brightened by the combination of Neapolitan tunefulness and Spanish dance rhythms.