Lumi 32

Sony Classical presents legendary soprano Kathleen Battle in nine of her foremost studio recordings in her ‘Complete Sony Recordings’. In the course of a remarkable career, launched in 1973 by mentor James Levine in their shared hometown of Cincinnati, Kathleen Battle has captivated international audiences. She has taken home numerous awards – among them five Grammys and London’s Olivier Award for her 1985 Covent Garden debut as Zerbinetta in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, the first American singer to win that prestigious prize – and become one of classical music’s best-selling artists.

This is a great set. The main competition to this production comes from Gardiner, with Anthony Rolfe Johnson as Orfeo. His is a superbly attractive voice, and he remains the best Orfeo I've heard. But Victor Torres is excellent too and his performance is very distinctive and rich in character. What's more, he is better recorded, as is the whole of Garrido's interpretation…”

The chamber cantata flourished in Italy as a counterpart to public opera and oratorio, cultivated by aristocratic patrons for their personal enjoyment. Perhaps because of its essentially private origins, this pervasive Baroque form remains relatively little known today.

At the end of the 1990s, the recordings of Gabriel Garrido represented an important landmark in the interpretation of Monteverdian opera. What attracted one’s attention straightaway in his versions were the brilliance and the hedonism of the actual recording itself. Following the precepts noted by the theorist Agostino Agazzari (a contemporary of Monteverdi) concerning continuo realization, Garrido involved not only the typical instruments which can play contrapuntally (keyboard, organ, archlute, harp, etc) but those with melodic capabilities as well. The resulting sound was opulent but never ornamental; and from it the dramatic rhythm flowed in a series of subtle ways. Reinforcing the instrumental complement was never done to the detriment of vocal concerns, which continued to have a leading role. It was precisely with the voices where Garrido set himself apart from his predecessors. By deciding to surround himself with Latin voices (Italian, French, Spanish, Argentinian…) he endowed his Monteverdi with warm, rounded and sensual vocal colours.

La morte di San Giuseppe (The Death of St. Joseph) is a fascinating curiosity from the pen of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, the Italian composer of La serva padrona – the little intermezzo through which the irreverent breezes of Mozartian opera first blew. This recording is a world premiere of La morte di San Giuseppe, which was known to scholars through fragmentary manuscripts in European libraries but for which a full autograph manuscript only recently surfaced. Designated as an oratorio, the work depicts the death of Joseph, husband of Mary. It features three characters in addition to Joseph, a tenor; St. Michael and Divine Love, both sopranos; and Mary, a contralto.

La resurrezione was Handel’s second oratorio and dates from his years in Italy between 1706 and 1710. While in Rome, he enjoyed the patronage of several wealthy noblemen; one of them was the Marquis Ruspoli who commissioned La resurrezione, first performed at his residence on Easter Day 1708. The piece is an interesting one, full of dramatically effective scenes in which Handel treats his characters – Christ himself does not appear – with that humanity which was later to become such a distinctive and satisfying feature of his operas and English oratorios. Conductor Marc Minkowski has frequently proved himself a persuasive and sympathetic Handelian and, in this new, vividly projected recording, gives us a vital impression of a particularly fine sample of Handel’s youth.

The first ever release of the late 1970’s recordings, La Petite Fenetre by Laurence Vanay is a powerful collection of songs from an unsung French artist. As an arranger at Château d’Hérouville studios, Vanay spent far too much time on other people’s sounds to release her own music. Finally these beautiful instrumentals get the airing they deserve…

The Swedish trumpet-player Niklas Eklund, born in Göteborg (Gothenburg) in 1969, trained at the School of Music and Musicology of Göteborg University. Further studies took place under the tutelage of Edward H. Tarr at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. After five years as solo trumpet with the Basle Radio Symphony Orchestra, he left the orchestra in the autumn of 1996 to further his career as a soloist. Since then he has appeared with leading ensembles and conductors such as Zubin Metha, John Eliot Gardiner, Heinz Holliger, András Schiff, Robert King, Eric Ericson, Reinhard Goebel, Gustav Leonhardt, the London Baroque, the Bach Ensemble (New York), the Drottningholm Baroque Ensemble and the English Baroque Soloists.

La Resurrezione, composed in Rome in 1708, was Handel’s first oratorio on a sacred theme. The soloists take the roles of an Angel, Mary Magdalene, Mary Cleophas, St John and Lucifer, who are portrayed in vivid operatic terms with the help of a lavishly-scored orchestra. The distinguished Dutch keyboard-player and conductor Ton Koopman (b.1944) founded the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra in 1979. The group consists of internationally renowned baroque specialists. Conductor and orchestra are joined here by singers acknowledged as leading specialists in the baroque repertoire.