La Ianva

'The rehearsals for La Vie parisienne are almost driving me insane', wrote librettist Ludovic Halevy a few days before the work's first performance. The artists of the Palais-Royal company were struggling with some of the musical numbers Offenbach had written for them. Under pressure, composer and librettists had to simplify, cut, rewrite and sometimes even abandon some of their most successful inspirations. The international success of the final score soon ensured the hundreds of pages reluctantly deleted by Offenbach were well and truly forgotten. Now the research of the Palazzetto Bru Zane team has uncovered all this musical material, making it possible to present the world premiere recording. Listeners can now enjoy a delightful Diplomatic Trio, a Seduction Quintet, a Roadsweeper's Song, an air for Urbain, the Fabliau of the Baroness, and more. The team of fourteen soloists assembled under the baton of Romain Dumas benefits from the glittering sonorities of the Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse, which previously recorded Offenbach's 'other' Vie parisienne back in… 1976.

Leonora, the passionate young girl choosing seclusion and life as a hermit to avoid the revenge of her brother and punish herself for her forbidden love with Alvaro and the death of her father, is one of the most tragic roles of the Verdian repertoire. It was also the first roles Maria Callas took up in her career. This recording with her mentor Tullio Serafin features an amazing cast and is one of the high points of the Verdi discography.

When four musicians of high caliber join forces, one can generally expect favorable results; but only the truly splendid manage to create a musical experience greater than the sum of its parts. Such is the nature of The Opus Project, founded in 2020 and already rated as one of Canada’s most eminent Early Music quartets.

Following an initial reconstruction on disc in 2015, the Ballet Royal de la Nuit enjoyed a triumphal modern premiere at the Théâtre de Caen in November 2017. That staged version, presented in this outstanding box set, at last includes the entire musical score (twenty-seven additional dances). The meticulous reconstitution of Sébastien Daucé, the incomparable poetry of Francesca Lattuada, an oneiric universe featuring more than 120 costumes designed by Olivier Charpentier, all contribute to an incredible enchantment further enhanced by the exploits of virtuoso jugglers and circus artists. In this ballet, a masterly achievement from every point of view, the spell remains unbroken from first note to last.

In a personal introduction to his own authoritative booklet essay, the Spanish violist Alejandro Marías relates how he acquired the rare facsimile of an even rarer manuscript, and came to realise that its contents had never seen the light of day in the modern era, let alone received attention on record. Thus he presents here the First Book of pieces – a second does not survive – by Jacques Morel.

Musically active in his home region and subsequently in Munich, Rome, Paris, Turin Hanover and Düsseldorf, Steffani also enjoyed considerable success with opera in Hamburg and garnered academic esteem in London. At the court of the Elector of Mu-nich, he was a chamber musician and principal organist from his early youth until 1688. In Hanover at the court of Duke Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg he was then kapellmeister until 1710. Dubbed a “dramatic entertainment”, La lotta d’Ercole con Acheloo was about a third shorter as was the music, there was no subdivision into acts, the subject was mythologi-cal and the four characters were treated with almost equal importance.

Raymond Leppard’s second and more renowned contribution to the modern revival of Cavalli: a classic among Baroque opera recordings which won the coveted Rosette award from the Penguin Record Guide. In 1651, seven years after Ormindo (also reissued by Eloquence in Leppard’s recording, 482 9382), Cavalli and his librettist Faustini scored another hit with the hungry but demanding Venetian opera public with a tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The change that all of Ovid’s central characters undergo is in this case suffered by the nymph Calisto, who is rejected by the goddess Diana, turned into a bear by the Furies and back into a human by Jupiter, who finally sets her among the stars in reward for her patience and her love.

We have been waiting impatiently for new songs from LA CASA AZUL to arrive. And it clearly wasn’t going to be an easy album. After having reached larger audiences, after having reached mainstream levels with their independent proposal, far from what the mainstream was used to, after having been heard both in small independent festivals as well as the return of Operación Triunfo, after having remixed Camilo Sesto’s “Vivir Así Es Morir De Amor” or having masterfully reconstructed and reinvented Nino Bravo’s whole album.