Gluck

Admirers of Gluck the reformer may be surprised by this thoroughly Baroque, extremely florid opera composed by him in 1765 (three years after Orfeo ed Euridice changed the landscape of opera forever). La corona , Gluck's setting of Metastasio's one-act azione teatrale (the master librettist's own term for a serenata with a plot), was commissioned by Queen Maria Theresa as a name-day gift for the emperor. Though is also styled an azione teatrale , the two operas could hardly be more different. Considering that La corona contains as treacherously difficult a collection of florid arias as can be found in any score of the period, it's hard to credit that it was created specifically to be sung by the three royal princesses; even the most adept prime donne of the period would have struggled to master its score. Due to the sudden death of the emperor, La corona was shelved and never performed in Gluck's lifetime. Atypically for a score of this quality and complexity, the composer mined relatively little of it for future works, with a notable exception in his transformation of the second part of the overture into the love duet in Paride ed Elena .

As the predecessors of Sony Classical, CBS Masterworks had not a catalogue of ""authenticity-minded"" recordings (the pioneering efforts of Raymond Leppard and Jean-Claude Malgoire notwithstanding), Sony made a distinctive new start and engaged indubitably one of the most experienced producers in the field of early music, Wolf Erichson. If the successes secured by such musicians as Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Frans Brüggen in the 1960s were the most visible signs to a wider audience of thorough-going change in the interpretation of music from medieval to baroque times, there was no doubt in assigning a part of the general success to the work of the production teams behind the recordings.

Following the success of 1999's thrilling Armide, Marc Minkowski and his excellent cast fully convey the power and drama of Gluck's masterpiece. They pull you into the story (based on a play by Euripides) through the emotional truth of their interpretation. The opening quiet strings create an air of mystery dispelled by a ferocious storm magnificently conveyed by these early-music specialists. Within a few phrases of Iphigénie's opening lament, Delunsch creates a believable, sympathetic character.

The eighteenth century is probably the most extraordinary period of transformation Europe has known since antiquity. Political upheavals kept pace with the innumerable inventions and discoveries of the age; every sector of the arts and of intellectual and material life was turned upside down. Between the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the revolution of 1789, music in its turn underwent a radical mutation that struck at the very heart of a well-established musical language. In this domain too, we are all children of the Age of Enlightenment: our conception of music and the way we ‘consume’ it still follows in many respects the agenda set by the eighteenth century. And it is not entirely by chance that harmonia mundi has chosen to offer you in 2011 a survey of this musical revolution which, without claiming to be exhaustive, will enable you to grasp the principal outlines of musical creation between the twilight of the Baroque and the dawn of Romanticism.