Graziano Gasparini

Carlo Ipata, inveterate searcher out of unjustly forgotten musical scores, directs Il Bajazet, the important three-act opera by Francesco Gasparini - which shows marked influences of the Roman Arcadian School of the Baroque. Ipata conducts the orchestra of his own Auser Musici for this new Glossa recording, made in conjunction with performances which took place at last year’s Opera Festival in Barga.

Three contrasting versions of the 'Stabat Mater', all most attractive and all composed within 20 years, in the second half of the 18th century. These excellent performances under Daniel Cuiller's direction are also all first recordings - and for Abos and Gasparini, first entries in the CD catalogue. An enterprising release, of great interest.

Countertenor Andreas Scholl's new CD is devoted to little-known, late-17th- and early-18th-century cantatas whose subject matter is Arcadia, a real region in Greece, but more frequently evoked as an idyllic place filled with innocent, simple shepherds and shepherdesses. Scholl employs a more operatic tone and attitude than we're accustomed to from countertenors. Not only does he use vibrato and "lean" on the voice, but he dips down, as in the final moments of a cantata by Marcello, into a deep, dark baritone range. The effect is dramatic and apt. Elsewhere his tone is just gorgeous and always expressive, he pays attention to the text of these works and captures the theatrical moment in each. The last movement of a work by Francesco Gasparini is excitingly acrobatic.

In his day Caspar Joseph Mertz (b.1806) was one of the most sought-after musicians in Europe, the court guitarist of Empress Carolina Augusta whose performances (together with his wife Josephine Plantin on piano) became famous throughout Austria, Hungary and Germany. Today he is best remembered for the successful Barden-Klänge, a cycle in which the guitar language of his time was enhanced to a stylistic expressiveness that parted sharply from contemporary works and which was more closely associated with the new, evocative aesthetics of the Romantic composers.