Andersen Glück

The packaging for this recording, though handsomely produced, gives a perplexing impression of the content of the CDs. The album's title (in French) is Philémon et Baucis, though there is no reference to that title in the extensive program notes, which focus exclusively on a work called Le Feste d'Apollo. In fact, Le Feste d'Apollo, premiered in 1769, consisted of a prologue and three unrelated short acts, each a self-contained opera, with texts by four different Italian poets. This CD set includes two of those operas, Aristeo and Bauci e Filemone, the third opera being an early version of Orfeo ed Eurydice written in 1762, 12 years before the definitive French version of Gluck's masterpiece.

Danish soprano Ditte Andersen and Swedish mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg were heard to stunning effect in Spedidam's splendid 2006 recording of Gluck's Aristeo and Bauci e Filemone with the ensemble Les Talens Lyriques under Christophe Rousset. Here they tackle another obscure corner of the Baroque: cantatas and operatic arias discovered in the libraries of the palaces at Meinungen and Sonderhausen, many of which were previously unknown. The Italian composers represented include a few who are well known, but they are predominantly obscure – Antonio Caldara, Giovanni Battista Bononcini, as well as his brother Antonio, Francesco Gasparini, Giovanni Battista Alveri, Giuseppe Maria Andrea di Orlandini, Attilio Ariosti, Giovanni Porta, and Tommaso Bernardo Gaffi.