John E. Silvia

Monteverdi's great opera is a celebration of unwavering devotion, conveyed in some of the composers most poignant, heart-breaking music. After two brutal decades of war, the weary Ulysses is washed up on the rocky shore of his home island of Ithaca. There, he discovers the hordes of depraved admirers who have beseiged his faithful wife Penelope in his 20-year absence and launches into battle to win back her love. Monteverdi's opera is a celebration of unwavering devotion, conveyed in some of the composers most poignant, heartbreaking music. Sir John Eliot Gardiner leads an exemplary cast of world-class singers alongside the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in this live recording from The National Forum of Music in Wrocaw, Poland part of their critically acclaimed Monteverdi 450 tour in 2017.

The restoration of this pastoral drama, created in 1721 in Milan, was supervised by French musicologist and Vivaldi specialist Frederic Delamea. These landmark performances from the Nice Baroque Ensemble are lead by Gilbert Bezzina and feature a cast of international soloists including Roberta Invernizzi, Gloria Banditelli, Johan Elwes and Philippe Cantor.

This 55-CD set chronicles the remarkable Archiv label, begun in 1947. Devoted mainly to early and Baroque music, the recordings presented here, in facsimiles of their original sleeves (a nice touch), cover the period from Gregorian chant to Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies, played on period instruments. There are stops in between for a great deal of Bach, music of the Gothic era, the French Baroque (Mouret, Delalande, Rameau, etc), Gibbons, Handel (Alcina, La Resurrezione, Messiah, Italian cantatas), Telemann, Zelenka, Gabrieli, Desprez, Haydn, LeJeune, and plenty of the usual, as well as unusual, suspects. There’s also a final CD with selections of new releases (more Handel, Cavalli, Gesualdo, Vivaldi).

175 years ago, on March 28th 1842, Otto Nicolai raised the baton for the first ever concert of a new ensemble destined to become one of the world's great orchestras. The Wiener Philharmoniker 175th Anniversary Edition offers a hand-picked selection on 44 CDs of the best albums of the orchestra released on the label. Presented in a luxury box with matt lamination and hot-foil printed gold, the box includes original cover art, rare photographs from the Wiener Philharmoniker Archives as well as two new essays by Dr. Silvia Kargl, Head of the Historic Archive of the Vienna Philharmonic, and Richard Evidon. With a Bonus DVD of the famous 1989 New Year's Concert conducted by Carlos Kleiber.

This 31 CD box set is being released to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday in December 2015. The set contains all the recital programmes of song, opera and operetta tha t she recorded for EMI between 1952 and 1974, and also included two live recitals. All the recordings have been newly remasteredto the highest standards by various studios including Abbey Road. A reigning soprano of her era, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (1915-2006) remains renowned for her vocal beauty and elegance and for her acute interpretative insight – above all in the music of Mozart, Wolf and Strauss.