Piccolo Coro Dell'antoniano IL Reggaetonno

Bonaventura Aliotti‚ unrepresented in the CD catalogues until now‚ was a Sicilian composer of the middle Baroque‚ born in Palermo around 1640‚ dying some 50 years later. A Minorite friar‚ he worked as organist in Padua and various other Italian cities‚ ending up as maestro di cappella in Palermo. His oratorios‚ of which only four survive‚ seem to have been greatly admired in his time. Il Sansone‚ first performed in Naples in 1686‚ tells the central part of the familiar story of Samson – his seduction and betrayal by Delilah‚ at the bidding of the Philistine Captain and with the help of the allegorical character Inganno (‘Treachery’) and Morpheus‚ god of sleep. It was revised two years later for performance in Modena‚ and the choral music was added; the Modena score‚ as the only surviving source for the work‚ is used here.

This exciting studio recording is the second project resulting from the collaboration between Marie-Nicole Lemieux Karina Gauvin and conductor and harpsichordist Alan Curtis' award winning Complesso Barocco. Giulio Cesare is one of Handel's most renowned operas and the role of Giulio Cesare is considered to be one of the most beautiful roles in the baroque opera. The full vocal cast is stunning and Alan Curtis shows once again why he is considered one of the world's leading Handel specialists.

Since (at least) the Greeks, humorists, moralists and satirists have been fascinated by the artistic game of inversion, of “the world turned upside down”, which is how one might translate the title of this largely forgotten opera by Salieri. It here gets its first ever recording. Present an image of society turned on its head and you enable your audience/reader/viewer to see the actual way of things in a whole new light. Your aims may be to expose the follies and errors of the actual, to propose a better way of doing things, or simply to get some laughs from the resulting improbabilities and surprises - or, of course, a mixture of all these motives and more.

Giovanni Antonini has been recording the complete symphonies of Joseph Haydn with the Alpha label for more than five years. Now the series is enriched by another monument by the Austrian composer: Die Schöpfung (The Creation), recorded in 2019 with the Bavarian Radio Chorus and his own orchestra, Il Giardino Armonico. This great oratorio was inspired by those of Handel, which Haydn heard performed by very large forces during his visits to England. The Creation, composed between September 1796 and April 1798, demanded such a colossal effort of him that he even fell ill just after its first performance; but the work enjoyed immense success. The marriage between the Bavarian chorus, so familiar with this masterpiece, and the period-instrument musicians of Il Giardino Armonico works perfectly, with a vocal trio composed of leading soloists: Anna Lucia Richter, Maximilian Schmitt and Florian Boesch.

From an early age Benedetto Marcello proved to be a man of great versatility: a poet, writer, musician, lawyer, judge, administrator and philologist, holding important posts in these functions during his entire life. As a composer he wrote a substantial oeuvre, covering all important fields of composition: sacred and secular choral works, opera and a large body of instrumental music.

Franz Hauk and the Simon Mayr Chorus and Ensemble have spearheaded the revival of the music of Johann Simon Mayr who was born in Bavaria but lived in Italy. In the latest instalment of their critically acclaimed recordings they turn to Il sogno di Partenope, an allegorical staged cantata composed to mark the rebuilding of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples following a fire in February 1816. Mayr’s significance as an intermediary between the opera seria of the late eighteenth-century and the melodrama of the early-nineteenth is reflected in this important work, a unique kind of ‘cantata opera’ of which only the second act survives.

The album marks 45 years since Chailly’s debut at La Scala, and also the signing of his exclusive contract with Decca.

The most comprehensive edition devoted to Gioachino Rossini marking his 150th anniversary.
Born in 1792, Rossini was the most popular opera composer of his time. Although he retired from the Opera scene in 1829, he continued to compose in other genres, including sacred music, piano and chamber works. He did gather his late works under the ironic title Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age), which veils a true collection of masterworks.

On 7th February 1857, after a delay of one year due to problems of copyright on a possible production of King Lear, Verdi accepted and signed a new agreement with the Teatro di San Carlo of Naples for an opera to be staged in January or February 1858. Not long after he had put behind the experiences of Simon Boccanegra (June 1857) and Aroldo (August), Verdi, then, had to face the issue of a new subject for Naples, which would no longer be King Lear, discarded for various reasons, and not even El tesorero del Rey by António García Gutiérrez or Ruy Blas by Hugo, to which he had given more serious thought, but Gustave III by Eugène Scribe, a play written in 1833 for Daniel Auber in which the king of Sweden is assassinated, in 1792, by a group of noblemen led by Jacob Ankarström. The composition of the score, between October 1857 and January 1858, went hand in hand with Verdi’s complex relationship with the Neapolitan censors, who would end up distorting the libretto and unnerving the composer to the point that he ended up refusing to stage the opera and breaking his agreement with the theatre.

Handel's Giove in Argo (Jupiter in Argos) is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, a pastiche (or, in the parlance of the time, pasticcio) of numbers from earlier operas stitched together into a mythological-pastoral plot that is absurd even by the standards of Baroque opera. It is a notable sign of the success of the Baroque opera revival that this has appeared on a semi-major label, Virgin Classics. The pieces were all from operas that were fairly recent at the time, and it's possible that the work was intended as a kind of greatest-hits reprise, but London audiences did not bite; the opera was long thought to be lost, and it had its modern premiere only in 2006, with newly written recitatives.