Digital Apollo

In 1934, 17-year-old Ella Fitzgerald took the stage at Harlem's legendary Apollo Theater on Amateur Night, winning first prize and launching an extraordinary, decade-spanning career.

Il pomo d’oro and Francesco Corti present Handel’s Apollo e Dafne and Armida abbandonata, together with two outstanding vocalists: soprano Kathryn Lewek (Armida & Dafne) and baritone John Chest (Apollo). Handel composed these two cantatas shortly after his Italian sojourn (1706-1709), and they demonstrate his acquaintance with and aptitude for Italian operatic music.

In 2018, the Styriarte Festival in Graz launched, in collaboration with Zefiro, a project to rediscover the operatic output of the Styrian composer Johann Joseph Fux (1660-1741), Kapellmeister at the imperial court in Vienna for forty years, with the aim of restaging six of his nineteen operas, one per year. With a cast of Baroque vocal specialists, led by Monica Piccinini and Arianna Venditelli, this set of Dafne in lauro marks the beginning of a new series in which Arcana will release the recordings made in the course of the six-year cycle.

Those inseparable twins, dress and identity, fell under the spotlight of the V&A’s Fashioning Masculinities. The exhibition’s galleries—Undressed, Overdressed, and Redressed—informed Oliver Zeffman’s choice of music for the first of his Music x Museums concerts. Recorded live in the V&A’s sublime Raphael Court, the performance opens with Lully’s Overture to Le bourgeois gentilhomme, a nod to the periwigged posturing of 17th-century Paris.

God Said No is the second studio album by American singer Omar Apollo, released on June 28, 2024, through Warner Records. It includes contributions from Mustafa and actor Pedro Pascal, and was preceded by the singles "Spite", "Dispose of Me" and "Less of You".