Giuseppe Oddo, Riccardo Antoniani L'italia Nel Petrolio

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.

The central facts of this brilliant performance are the conductor's vision and energy, expressed through a virtuoso orchestra and a cast carefully selected for theatrical as well as musical skills. The feeling of unrelenting pressure in the music seems to be an externalization of Don Giovanni's compulsions, which are only thinly veiled by his aristocratic manner and Mozart's mellifluous but intensely dramatic music. Riccardo Muti's tempos are often fast, but not so fast as to interfere with the fine nuances of dramatic expression in the orchestra and the singers, and he makes the gritty realities underlying the often smooth surface of the words and music intensely clear at every point.

In many ways this is a magnificent achievement… Muti conducts with real assurance. Pacing the drama magnificently, it is on performances like these that the controversial Maestro has made his well-deserved musical reputation. Tell emerges as a masterpiece from first to last. Rossini's compositional confidence in his craft is never once in doubt, and there is no trace of any longueur anywhere.

"Strauss: Metamorphoses & Wind Sonatina No. 1" is the second album in a series of six that the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg will release on the Berlin Classics label until 2025. For this album, the orchestra has chosen the internationally renowned conductor Riccardo Minasi. Originally, a concert under his baton was to take place at Salzburg's "Großes Festspielhaus" in the 2020/21 season, but like so many events, it had to be canceled. Instead, the decision was made to record with repertoire whose instrumentation sizes were appropriate to the conditions: Richard Strauss "Metamorphosen" for 23 solo strings and the first Sonatina for 16 wind instruments. The repertoire thus selected highlights the individual sections of the orchestra, strings and winds, and illustrates the orchestra's flexibility in seemingly effortlessly realigning itself for the repertoire at hand. It further demonstrates that the orchestra's constant preoccupation with its core repertoire informs its approach to the music of later eras - impressively heard on the current album of High Romantic music by the late Richard Stauss.

It's incredible that a work considered as securely at the core of the Western musical canon as J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion didn't receive a complete recording until after the Second World War, and that prior to that, unabridged performances were exceptionally rare; even Mendelssohn's momentous 1841 Leipzig performance was heavily cut, and Mendelssohn's son reported that even so, much of the audience "fled yawning before it was over." The earliest nearly complete recording was made in 1941 with Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra and Thomanernchor, and those same forces are brought together again, along with the Tölzer Knabenchor, in this 2009 performance led by Riccardo Chailly.

Handel’s sparkling opera Partenope reunites countertenor Philippe Jaroussky and soprano Karina Gauvin, who both made such an impact in the recording of Steffani’s rediscovered Niobe – released by Erato in early 2015 and welcomed by Gramophone as “a landmark event”. Every moment of Partenope’s comedy, romance and drama is captured by the dynamic conductor Riccardo Minasi and his ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro.

Two 16th-century masters of the Spanish vihuela, speaking afresh to the 21st century through the modern guitar of Giuseppe Chiaramonte.

When he announced in 2004 that he was stepping down as music director from the Royal Concertgebouw, easily one of the best orchestras in the world, it would have been easy for anyone to brand Riccardo Chailly as clinically insane. His announcement stunned the music world. The young, passionate Chailly had succeeded in bringing a new energy and vitality to the Concertgebouw during his impressive 16-year tenure.

Although Bach obviously felt at home composing for the recorder and used it in important works such as the Brandenburg Concertos and several cantatas, he never composed a concerto for solo recorder - in fact, he only wrote original solo concertos for harpsichord and violin.