Subrahmanya L. Hegde

Gioachino Rossini's opera L'Italiana in Algeri is one of the composer's best-known operas and has lost none of its rousing freshness and energy since its premiere in 1813. At the end of 2022, the young conductor Jakob Lehmann and his Eroica Berlin orchestra presented at the Delphi Theatre (Berlin) Rossini's music according to the latest knowledge of historical performance practice.

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Today's music lovers associate L’Orfeo first and foremost with Claudio Monteverdi's famous opera from 1607, while the version by Luigi Rossi (1597-1653), premiered four decades later, has remained less well-known. Rossi had served as a musician first for the noble families Borghese and Barberini in Florence and Rome, respectively, before he moved to France in 1646, where he became the most respected composer at the court of Cardinal Mazarin.His L'Orfeo, with a libretto by Francesco Buti, was premiered on 2 March 1647 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris. It was one of the first operas ever performed in France. The premiere was magnificently staged, full of magnificent sets and machinery, with over 200 people employed to work on the scenery. The performance lasted about six hours and was a great success for Rossi. Twenty years after the first recording by Les Arts Florissants and William Christie, Elena Sartori and her ensemble Allabastrina present now the second recording of this opera. The total playing time is slightly under four hours, almost Wagnerian proportions. Sartori uses exclusively Italian forces (17 solo singers and choristers), with the Baroque experts Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli (Orfeo) and Emanuela Galli (Euridice) in the main roles.

Gioachino Rossini's opera L'Italiana in Algeri is one of the composer's best-known operas and has lost none of its rousing freshness and energy since its premiere in 1813. At the end of 2022, the young conductor Jakob Lehmann and his Eroica Berlin orchestra presented at the Delphi Theatre (Berlin) Rossini's music according to the latest knowledge of historical performance practice.

Zu den Markenzeichen des Alte Musik-Orchesters l'arte del mondo gehören seit 2004 aufsehenerregende Wiederentdeckungen auch auf dem Gebiet der Oper. Nun erweitern das Orchester und sein künstlerischer Leiter Werner Ehrhardt die vielfach preisgekrönte Diskographie um eine weitere spektakuläre Opernrarität. Es ist die Opernsatire »L'isola d'Alcina«, mit der der Italiener und Mozart-Zeitgenosse Giuseppe Gazzaniga die zahllosen »Alcina«-Opern des Barocks verballhornte. 1772 wurde Gazzanigas komische Oper in Venedig uraufgeführt und bald darauf europaweit gespielt. Jetzt legt das von Werner Ehrhardt dirigierte Orchester l'arte del mondo zusammen mit einem erstklassigen Solistenensemble diese Opernwiederentdeckung in einem Live-Mitschnitt von 2022, in Koproduktion mit dem WDR, vor. Die Rolle der alle Männer umgarnenden Zauberin Alcina übernimmt die Sopranistin Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli.

This album presents the songs from The Threepenny Opera in a new French translation by Alexandre Pateau. The recording was made at the 2023 Festival d'Aix-en-Provence during the run of the new production of the legendary work by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann, which features the troupe of the Comedie-Francaise and the musicians of Le Balcon, conducted by Maxime Pascal with Thomas Ostermeier as stage director. In this parody of an opera, the songs are the driving force behind the action and the characters ape the bourgeois lifestyle of the audience, the better to denounce the period of moral confusion they are going through. With Maxime Pascal at the helm of a dozen multi-instrumentalists from Le Balcon, we hear a version based on that of the first performance - hard-hitting and as close as possible to the tremendous creative energy deployed by the two creators of the work in the summer of 1928 - acted and sung by the troupe of the Comedie-Francaise, who rise to all its challenges with brio. Other special features of this album are a previously unrecorded song on a text by Yvette Guilbert and the linking texts between the songs read in French by Ostermeier himself. As Diapason wrote of this production, 'Almost a century after its premiere, The Threepenny Opera has lost none of its subversive power.'

This album presents the songs from The Threepenny Opera in a new French translation by Alexandre Pateau. The recording was made at the 2023 Festival d'Aix-en-Provence during the run of the new production of the legendary work by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann, which features the troupe of the Comedie-Francaise and the musicians of Le Balcon, conducted by Maxime Pascal with Thomas Ostermeier as stage director. In this parody of an opera, the songs are the driving force behind the action and the characters ape the bourgeois lifestyle of the audience, the better to denounce the period of moral confusion they are going through. With Maxime Pascal at the helm of a dozen multi-instrumentalists from Le Balcon, we hear a version based on that of the first performance - hard-hitting and as close as possible to the tremendous creative energy deployed by the two creators of the work in the summer of 1928 - acted and sung by the troupe of the Comedie-Francaise, who rise to all its challenges with brio. Other special features of this album are a previously unrecorded song on a text by Yvette Guilbert and the linking texts between the songs read in French by Ostermeier himself. As Diapason wrote of this production, 'Almost a century after its premiere, The Threepenny Opera has lost none of its subversive power.'

Between the publication of the Second Book in 1701 and that of the Third Book, ten years went by, during which Marais established himself as a composer of tragédies lyriques.