Mark Elder

Set in 16th-century India, Il Paria is a powerful and moving story of impossible love, social barriers and religious intolerance. Donizetti was particularly proud of his work, reusing many of its melodies in future compositions. Returning to Opera Rara following our multi-award-winning recording of Rossini’s Semiramide, Albina Shagimuratova leads a stellar cast including René Barbera, singing one of the most demanding roles ever written for tenor, and the talented Georgian baritone Misha Kiria in the title character.

Roderick Williams heads up the cast for this new recording of Delius' A Mass of Life with the Bergen Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Mark Elder. Accompanied by soloists Gemma Summerfield, Claudia Huckle and Bror Magnus Todenes, the Bergen Philharmonic Choir and Edvard Grieg Kor join Collegium Musicum Choir to complete the tour de force needed to perform and record this monumental work.

Among the first releases on the Hallé recording label, established in 2003, were Elgar’s Symphonies Nos 1 and 2. This recording revisits those works nearly 20 years later, and mark the culmination of Sir Mark Elder’s tenure as Music Director The First Symphony was premiered in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, in 1908 by the Hallé and its Music Director, Hans Richter to whom the symphony is dedicated. It is a work of astonishing musical and structural mastery which was greeted with worldwide acclaim, receiving one hundred performances in its first year. The musical material demonstrates Elgar’s skill at melody and transformation and presents a wide emotional range.

This is a relatively new venture for the outstandingly imaginative recording outfit that is Opera Rara. The label's fifty-fourth recording sees them venturing on an uncompleted work by Donizetti, the composer they love the most. The composer had decamped from Naples to Paris when the censors, on the king’s personal instructions, banned his opera Poliuto.

With his affinity for the 16th-century sculptor Benvenuto Cellini’s advocacy of artistic and personal freedom, Hector Berlioz went straight for the grand gesture with his first completed opera. Returning to it years after initial production debacles, Berlioz stated that he would ‘never again find such verve and Cellinian impetuosity, nor such a variety of ideas.’ The plot revolves around Cellini’s wooing of Teresa, a match frustrated at every opportunity by his rival, the cowardly Fieramosca. Benvenuto Cellini is a pithy work combining romance, excitement, violence, comedy and spectacle; the perfect stage for Terry Gilliam’s stylishly colorful and larger than life directing.

Starring Angela Gheorghiu as the celebrated French actress Adriana Lecouvreur and Jonas Kaufmann as her lover Maurizio, Count of Saxony, Cilea’s verismo drama explores celebrity, romance, jealousy, and death. The trio of sublime voices is completed by Russian mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina as Adriana’s jealous rival, the Princess de Bouillon. David McVicar’s hit production – the first performance of the opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden for more than a century – presents the life of the French actress as a blurring of the distinction between fantasy and reality.