Braccioli Riccardo

This is the second solo outing for Peruvian-born bel canto tenor Juan Diego Flórez, who, at the age of 30, is garnering high acclaim for his clear, loud voice and secure confidence, on-stage charisma, and outstanding sense of vocal expressiveness. Una furtima lagrima, indeed, is an earnest, earthy, easily accessible disc of arias, choral ensembles, and scenes drawn from works of Bellini and Donizetti. On this beautifully recorded Decca disc Flórez is helped out by the Orchestra Sinfonica e Coro di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, conductor Riccardo Frizza, and vocal artists covering other roles in these operatic "bleeding chunks" including Nikola Mijailovic, Nicola Uliveri, and Ermonela Jaho.

How good to see Riccardo Chailly so radiant at the end of this great event.It's an exhilaration he earns through sheer hard work as well as injecting the adrenalin at most of the right moments.(Majority) of the singers are excellent,from two very different but keenly-projected lyric-dramatic sopranos,Erika Sunnegardh and Ricardo Merbeth,to Georg Zeppenfeld,whose bass is rock solid and expressive across a huge range.Chailly holds attention between movements and makes you realise how many soloists within the orchestra have to sing,too.His Leader,the superb Sebastian Breuninger,assists him between blazes in the most striking of chamber-musical moments.Breuninger shares the front desk of viloins in Claudio Abbado's Lucerne festival Orchestra,but this one Mahler symphony Abbado's forces have yet to tackle,and Chailly's rendering leads the field on DVD. (BBC Music Magzine)

Gustav Mahlers 8th Symphony breaks the boundaries of the symphonic form in a world-embracing gesture. Riccardo Chailly is one of the staunchest performers of this work, and therefore it seemed appropriate in many ways that he chose this work for his inaugural concert as Claudio Abbados successor and new music director of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. The artistic statement was combined with a deeply personal conviction: it should be a 'tribute to Claudio', the highly esteemed friend and colleague to whom Chailly, as he emphasizes, owes very much. On 12 August 2016, Claudio Abbados unfinished Mahler cycle with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra was completed in a breathtaking performance of the Mahler 8th, simultaneously heralding in a new era in Lucerne.

Here are two of Rossini's "secular" cantatas: "The Lament of Harmony on the Death of Orpheus" for tenor, male chorus, and orchestra, written when he was a 16-year-old conservatory student, and the far more substantial "Wedding of Thetis and Peleus," one of many such pieces he composed for special occasions, commissioned for the marriage of an Italian princess to a French prince. Both consist of primarily short, separate, contrasting numbers, most of which would be perfectly at home in the opera house.

Cecilia Bartoli remains one of the world's finest Rossini singers and she proves it again with Il Turco in Italia, her 1st complete Rossini recording since 1993. The performance was recorded in Milan, with the power of the La Scala Orchestra & Chorus and the best Rossini an cast possible, led - of course - by Cecilia Bartoli's coloratura, more brilliant than ever.

Riccardo Muti's 2011 performances of Saverio Mercadante's I due Figaro (The Two Figaros) were the first it had received since 1835, and this Ducale release of the presentation at the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna, Italy, is the world-premiere recording. The story of this comic opera is a sequel to events in the Beaumarchais plays, which inspired Rossini's Barber of Seville and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro; the characters of Figaro, Susanna, Cherubino, and the Count and Countess Almaviva are seen a decade later in another farce of disguises and deception. The music is very much in the animated style of Rossini, with an exotic quality that Mercadante discovered on his visit to Madrid, and the mood of the opera is brightened by the combination of Neapolitan tunefulness and Spanish dance rhythms.

In 2010, Maestro Riccardo Chailly releases Johann Sebastian Bach for Decca for the very first time. Having conducted the illustrious Gewandhaus Orchestra since 1986, this esteemed conductor’s association with Leipzig is but one year less than Bach’s. Played on modern instruments, Chailly’s Bach beautifully demonstrates that vivid, stylistically aware performance is not the exclusive preserve of period instrument ensembles. Every concerto of this first release – the Brandenburg Concertos – showcases the Orchestra’s expert soloists. Collectively, they celebrate the orchestra’s renaissance under its charismatic Italian music director. This release will be followed up later in the year with new recordings of the St Matthew Passion and Christmas Oratorio.

Rossini's La donna del lago ("The Lady of the Lake") is a lush, positively verdant dramatic opera, first performed in 1819, that deserves to be better known. Derived from Sir Walter Scott's famous poem, the story concerns love both unrequited and requited amid rebellious Scottish clans, as the titular lady is wooed by two rivals while her heart is pledged to another. Given Rossini's luxuriant orchestration and emphasis on romance, one can't help feeling that the composer had the hills of Tuscany more in mind than the rugged Scottish highlands. A succession of highly charged scenas contrast with languid melodies, such as Ellen's delightful introductory "Oh mattutini albori", making this a less bloodily melodramatic companion-piece to Donizetti's Scott-inspired Lucia di Lammermoor.

La Cenerentola is one of the few operas to have an important subtitle, "The Triumph of Virtue". This Salzburg production makes a point of its being a moral tale rather than a mere fairy tale like the version reflexively sung by Angelina in her "Cavatina": the defeat and forgiveness of the stepsisters and their greedy father is a settling of moral accounts. The production is also tremendous fun–partly because of gimmicks like the mechanical coach and horses that arrives on stage in the high wind of the Act Two storm–but mostly because of the endlessly energetic pulse of Riccardo Chailly's conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic.