Sfera Ebbasta Gelosi

After a long period of neglect, Handel's 1719 opera Ottone has attracted renewed attention from historical-performance groups. The opera deals with episodes from the life of Otto II, Holy Roman Emperor in the 10th century, a topic so obscure that even for an 18th century audience an "argument" had to be attached to the libretto by way of background information. The opera was highly successful in Handel's own time, perhaps less for its musical value than for the always fun news stories about the stars in Handel's orbit; this time the feature was soprano Francesca Cuzzoni, who refused to sing the aria "Falsa imagine" until Handel threatened to throw her out a window.

Karl-Ernst Schröder was born in Eschweiler, Germany in 1958. He studied Renaissance guitar and lute with Professor Tadashi Sasaki at the Aachen Musikhochschule, attending masterclasses with Anthony Bailes and afterwards continuing his training in early music performance at Switzerland's Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in the lute classes of Eugen M Dombois and Hopkinson Smith. He collaborated with many Baroque and Renaissance ensembles including Mala Punica (Pedro Memelsdorff), Dolcissimo Sospiro, the Basel Consort, various groups associated with René Jacobs, the Badinierie Ensemble, the Lyra Consort, Concerto Köln, the Freiburg Barockorchester, Aurora/Enrico Gatti, Ludwig-Senfl-Ensemble (Michel Piguet), Sonatori Gelosi and Ensemble 415 (Chiara Banchini)…

George Frideric Handel - The King's Consort / Robert King - Ottone re di Germania HWV 15 (Repost)
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 880 MB | MP3 CBR 320: 430 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info + Rev-Part
Label/Cat#: Hyperion CDA66751/3 | Country/Year: UK 1993 [3xCD] | Genre: Classical | Style: Opera

The first performance of Handel’s Ottone took place in London on 12 January 1723 at the King’s Theatre. Handel had finished composing the opera the previous summer, with the first draft completed on 10 August, but he had to make several revisions before the first performance took place…

Cecilia Bartoli - The Salieri Album
EAC+LOG+CUE | WV: 268 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Decca # 475 100-2 | Country/Year: Europe 2003
Genre: Classical | Style: Classical Period, Opera

… It's a gem of an album, as good or better than her similar projects devoted to Vivaldi and Gluck. (…) This is an album not to be missed.

In Dowland’s words: “ingenuous profession of Musicke, which from my childhoode I have ever aymed at,… the better to attain so excellent a science”. Mike Fentross achieves this “divine science of musicke” by wooing his audience by “speaking harmony” on his sweet lute. His art entwines harmony and poetry, albeit often a melancholic art, which is then framed by the proportions of rhythm. His art teaches, stirs and delights the heart and soul of his honorable listeners in profound ways. Mike Fentross first studied with Toyohiko Satoh at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, then with Nigel North and José Miguel Moreno.

In 2019 the music world commemorated the 350th anniversary of the death of MarcAntonio Cesti, the greatest composer of opera comedies and the most gifted melodist of the seventeenth century. Since Cesti lived and worked in Innsbruck for many years, La Dori, his brilliant comedy of disguises and hidden identities, was the perfect choice for posthumous honors »on location.« Ottavio Dantone, who is active from the Milan Scala to the Salzburg Festival with his specialists support in the field of Baroque and Classical opera, conducted his exquisite original sound ensemble, the Accademia Bizantina on the Innsbruck opera stage and set in motion the Dori renaissance. This comedy of loves errors set by the banks of the Euphrates and at the court of Babylon is now available for audio enjoyment on cpo.

There is no complete surviving score for Vivaldi's Ercole su'l Termodonte, but there is enough existing material that modern scholars have been able to reconstruct it primarily by making new settings of the lost recitatives. The first production of the opera since Vivaldi's time was at Spoleto in 2006 in a version by Alessandro Ciccolini, which was released as a DVD. Conductor Fabio Biondi made a version introduced in Venice in 2007, which is recorded on this 2010 Virgin CD. Biondi's recording has the advantage of two international superstars in the leading roles, tenor Rolando Villazón and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, and soprano Diana Damrau is nearly in their league. Villazón's earthy voice is usually associated with 19th century and verismo Italian repertoire, but he has an acute sensitivity to Baroque vocal style, and his robust, almost baritonal tenor is entirely appropriate for a larger-than-life character like Hercules.

Girolamo Frescobaldi - Secular Madrigals - Modo Antiquo/Bettina Hoffmann
Frescobaldi Edition, Vol. 6: Il Primo Libro dei Madrigali a cinque voci (1608)
Classical | 1 CD | EAC | FLAC, CUE, LOG | Scans | 205 MB | RS
Recorded: 13-15/4 2008, Oratorio San Francesco Poverino, Florence
Released: 2009 | Label: Brilliant 93793 | TT: 41:56
Modo Antiquo, dir. Bettina Hoffmann

Volume 6 of this path-breaking series, the first to record every extant work by Girolamo Frescobaldi, focuses on the secular madrigals. These works - he wrote one book, and evidently hoped to write more - are no less innovatory than the keyboard works that so impressed and influenced J. S. Bach. […] The nineteen madrigals with which Frescobaldi introduced himself have an admirable clarity of formal design that gives each line its due weight in terms of duration and emotion, and a transparent counterpoint that favours delicacy over density as a stylistic means, homophonic and polyphonic sections being cleverly alternated. It is pleasing to see the respect that Frescobaldi pays to the texts: the words are set to graceful melodic phrases, and never obscured by excessive counterpoint, but interpreted literally with immediate attention to meaning. (brilliantclassics.com)