Lina Tur Bonet & Musica Alchemica Antonio Vivald

After their acclaimed recording of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, La Nuova Musica and David Bates expand their PENTATONE discography with Handel’s Unsung Heroes, in which the instrumentalists of Handel’s operas are put centre stage. Traditionally restricted to an “invisible” existence in the orchestra pit, La Nuova Musica’s obbligato instrumentalists – violinist Thomas Gould, oboist Leo Duarte and bassoonist Joe Qiu – are now in the limelight. They will stand as equal partners alongside a world-class line up of soloists – soprano Lucy Crowe, mezzo-soprano Christine Rice and countertenor Iestyn Davies – showing how Handel wrote music as virtuosic and lyrical for his unsung heroes as for their singing counterparts. The album includes arias from Handel masterpieces such as Rinaldo, Giulio Cesare, Agrippina and Ariodante.

The first monographic recording entirely dedicated to Francesco Rasi is released for the 400th anniversary of his death (30 November 1621). The first interpreter of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, an astonishing tenor and poet with a life studded with triumphs, constant travels, debts and murders, this native of Arezzo was fought over by all the courts of Italy and Europe. The pieces, on texts by Petrarch, Guarini, Chiabrera and Rasi himself – including ten world premieres – are taken from the Vaghezze di Musica (1608) and the Madrigali (1610). Tenor soloist Riccardo Pisani explores their extraordinary poetic and musical power, in a kaleidoscope of affects divided into seven ‘strings of the lyre’. He is accompanied by the Ensemble Arte Musica, directed by harpsichordist Francesco Cera. The two artists have been collaborating for years on rediscovering the Italian vocal repertory of the seventeenth century, as witnessed by the recent success of their set of Frescobaldi CDs, released on Arcana.

Michel Roux, one of the greatest bass-baritones of the 1950s was very sought-after performer of Offenbach. He recorded three operettas conducted by Jules Gressier, witfully impersonating the Baron hoping for extra-conjugal adventures in La vie Parisienne.

This musical journey takes its title from one of William Corbett's Bizzarie universali, a set of concertos which, in truth, owe much more to the Italian tradition than to the Iberian peninsula.

Following in the footsteps of his elders (Chausson, Bizet, Gounod…), Gabriel Fauré perpetuated the tradition of incidental music to enhance plays and reinforce their dramaturgy. He left behind him several major works that are among the most beautiful pages of this repertoire, sometimes unfairly considered as old-fashioned by some of today's artists. Yet music for the stage is of major interest, especially from the golden age of French music, stretching from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, when live music was very much an integral part of the theatrical creation process. Today, not only do very few authors call upon composers to write music for the stage, but live music has also long since been replaced by the more convenient and, alas, undeniably more economical recording.

Michel Roux, one of the greatest bass-baritones of the 1950s was very sought-after performer of Offenbach. He recorded three operettas conducted by Jules Gressier, witfully impersonating the Baron hoping for extra-conjugal adventures in La vie Parisienne.

These songs for one and two voices come from the first four of D’India’s five books of Musiche, a series containing masterpieces of astonishing originality in the style of monody (solo melody with accompaniment), which had eclipsed the polyphonic madrigal in popularity at the dawn of the 17th century. With a career based largely in Turin and Rome, Sigismondo D’India nevertheless demonstrates stylistic links to both Monteverdi and Gesualdo, and it is the latter’s influence which supports new scholarship claiming D’India grew up in Naples (not Sicily) in the shadow of the great madrigalist’s free thinking on harmony. That very harmonic freedom – to accentuate key emotions in the text with piquant chord changes – is the hallmark of D’India’s own, self-styled ‘true manner’ of composing monody, adopted from Gesualdo’s intense, chromatic polyphony to the solo song or duet, and it suggests a Neapolitan, rather than Roman–Florentine, musical background.

Bach in Context a long-term collaboration series between Musica Amphion and Gesualdo Consort Amsterdam sheds new light on Bach s magnificent repertoire. By employing the church organ as continuo instrument and a one-per-part vocal setting, Bach s sound picture and performing practice is approached as closely as possible.

The Prelude and Fugue in E Minor forms a frame, as it did in Bach’s time, around this program, designed to fit the liturgical format that gave Bach’s music its purpose; the Fantasia precedes the motet on which it is based and follows Cantata BWV 64, which quotes the fifth stanza of Johann Franck’s poem “Jesu, meine Freude.” The recording was made in the Arnstadt church where Bach served from 1703 to 1707 (the 1699 organ has recently been restored), but the two cantatas and the motet date from his first year in Leipzig. This impressive presentation, the first in a series called Bach in Context, is a hardbound book of 84 pages. The notes favor Joshua Rifkin’s understanding of one voice to a part in Bach’s vocal/choral music, the use of a harpsichord as well as the church organ (not the more versatile chest organ), and the liturgical context in which the music was originally sung.