The Opera!

10 CD Wallet Box of the greatest voices in Opera including Maria Callas, Rosa Ponselle, Kirsten Flagstad, Lotte Lehman, Enrico Caruso, Giuseppe Stefano, Benjamino Gigli, Lauritz Melchior, Richard Tauber and Tito Gobbi.

2005 second edition of the 1998 hit album from the popular Italian tenor. This Special Edition of Bocelli's Aria album features the bonus tracks "The Pearl Fishers' Duet" featuring Bryn Terfel and Di Quella Pira. Crossover sensation Andrea Bocelli's Aria served as the singer's operatic calling card, and as such it left behind the synth-infused ballads and lighter Italian fare of his earlier work and delved into the dramatic warhorses of the tenor repertory. Soliciting the help of Gianandrea Noseda and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Orchestra underscored the singer's desire to be taken seriously, since both conductor and ensemble were already veterans of fine operatic recordings.

A newly written opera about Kirsten Flagstad! In Flagstad - An Opera we get close to our biggest international opera star. The woman called "the Voice of the Century" looks back on her turbulent life, in a work written by Ketil Bjørnstad and Einar Bjørge.

Diva de Lai is coming on to the new music scene as an innovative band that is looking to mix two unique styles, Rock and Opera. Dylan at the Opera is a concept album composed of original Bob Dylan songs rearranged in different rock styles with operatic vocals and represents their latest release.

Between Die Entführung aus dem Serail and the advent of the famous ‘Da Ponte trilogy’, Mozart threw himself frantically into the search for the right libretto, capable of taking the spectator to lands still unexplored where the drama and the psychology of the characters would be sublimated by the music. Hence, in the years between 1782 and 1786, he set up a veritable laboratory for dramatic music: a musical corpus of concert arias, sketches, and stylistic exercises like the canon – here brilliantly organised as an imaginary dramma giocoso in three scenes, each heralding in its own way one of the summits to come: Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così.

Commissioned for the coronation of Leopold II in Prague, Mozart’s last opera is a deep, humane reflection on relationships, power and forgiveness. With the composition of some of the most beautiful passages in his oeuvre, Mozart has succeeded in giving this opera seria both a noble sobriety and transparent instrumentation, to which this commanding production by the Herrmann partnership does full justice on all levels. Susan Graham’s most extraordinary Sesto and Christoph Prégardien’s superb Tito set the standard for this riveting Opéra national de Paris performance, conducted by the outstanding Sylvain Cambreling.

London Concertante presents a sensational evening at the opera with an array of the finest opera arias and overtures, performing works from Puccini, Verdi, Rossini, and Mozart. Enjoy some of the best from Madame Butterfly, Turandot, Tosca, The Barber of Seville, Carmen, Così fan tutte and so much more.

In the early 1670s, soon after Venetian opera became established in Naples, a series of comic figures began to inhabit secular but also sacred operas. These stock characters included the Neapolitan, the Calabrian and the Boy, and all three plus a fourth, ‘The Spaniard’, appear in a comic intermezzo inserted in the 1673 opera Il disperato innocente by the little-known Francesco Antonio Boero. This is the oldest surviving Neapolitan comic intermezzo, and, along with its Prologue, seems to have been written by other authors. This video preserves a historically informed performance given by Antonio Florio with Pino De Vittorio that explores the tradition of the intermezzo in 17th century plots.

The Venice Baroque Orchestra and a fine line-up of singers present a pasticcio setting of a libretto by Metastasio, with contributions from composers including Caldara, Vivaldi, Galuppi, Hasse and Paisiello. In the eighteenth century, 1,300 years after the last Olympic Games in ancient times, the Olympic theme was highly fashionable. Many composers based operas on the libretto L'Olimpiade by Metastasio. This recording has been structured to contain all of Metastasio’s original arias; it is a pasticcio in the sense that the music is by 16 different composers amongst the many that set the libretto between 1733 and the end of the century.