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With her enchanting voice, profound musicality and extraordinary vocal range, the Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin has been seducing audiences and critics around the world. Following the immense success of her CD Handel Arias, she returns with a new recording of arias, most never recorded, from the operas of Nicola Porpora (1686-1768).

The scope and grandeur of Handel's operatic output – the musical variety and inventiveness, the depth of psychological insight, as well as the sheer volume of works – continue to astonish as new operas are brought to light and more familiar works are given productions and recordings that do justice to the material. Ariodante, written in 1735, is nowhere nearly as frequently performed as the more famous operas like Giulio Cesare, but neither is it entirely obscure, and there have been several very fine modern recordings. This version with Alan Curtis leading Il Complesso Barocco can be recommended without reservation to anyone coming to the opera for the first time or for anyone who's already a fan.

One of Handel’s rarer operas, Arminio, set at the time of the Roman Empire, was first performed in 1737. “On the evidence of this very fine recording,” said Gramophone when this performance first appeared, “it can stand among the best of the Handel operas, full of beautiful and imaginative things.” Conducting a cast led by the virtuosic Vivica Genaux in the title role – composed for the castrato Domenico Annibali – is the renowned Handel specialist Alan Curtis.

Until recently, so much of this first opera that Handel wrote for Italy was lost that it was unviable to stage it. The rediscovery of the missing material, a triumph of scholarly detective work, reveals the confident high spirits which characterise so much of Handel’s music during his Italian visit. It lacks the instrumental colours of his more lavish London productions, with many arias supported by continuo alone. All are here, complete (even six which Handel himself discarded), but many are brief and, under Curtis’s lively direction, the dramatic tension builds up splendidly.

"L'infedeltà costante" - "Die beständige Untreue", mit diesem Titel haben Anna Bonitatibus und Alan Curtis ihre Haydn-CD umschrieben. Denn um "Untreue" in der einen oder anderen Art geht es bei all den diversen Arien aus Haydns zahlreichen Opern. Die italienische Mezzosopranistin Anna Bonitatibus hat sich Arien aus den Opern La fedeltà premiata, Orlando Palladino, La vera costanza, L'infedeltà delusa, La frascatana, L` isola disabitata und Arianna a Naxos ausgesucht, die Haydn zu Recht als Opernkomponisten "rehabilitieren": Musikalisch abwechslungsreiche, ausdrucksstarke Stücke, die mannigfaltige Facetten von der schlichten Melodie bis hin zu atemberaubenden Koloraturen aufweisen. Eine echte Entdeckung, welche die Sängerin Alan Curtis und sein Complesso Barocco beschwingt präsentieren.

Er war Impresario, Librettist, Komponist und ein hervorragender Theorbenspieler – doch in erster Linie fühlte sich Benedetto Ferrari als Musiker. Um 1604 in Reggio Emilia nordwestlich von Modena geboren, studierte er in Rom. 1637 ging er das Wagnis ein, mit dem Teatro S. Cassiano das erste öffentliche Opernhaus und selbsttragende Unternehmen in Venedig zu gründen. Die Logen wurden an Adlige und reiche Bürgerfamilien verpachtet. Das Parkett war zunächst unbestuhlt, frei auch für Turniere und Umzüge; die Plätze konnte jedermann kaufen. Verlängert wurde der Zuschauerraum durch die Bühne, der Orchestergraben blieb lange versenkt. An sämtlichen Opern, die für dieses und die anderen Häuser, die plötzlich wie Pilze aus dem Boden schossen, benötigt wurden, war Ferrari als Komponist und Librettist beteiligt. Doch gelten seine Partituren größtenteils als verschollen, weshalb wir Ferrari als Komponisten lediglich aus seinen drei Büchern mit Kammerkantaten, den Musiche varie a voce sola, kannten.

Supreme master of the Baroque concerto and one of the finest composers of sacred music, Vivaldi is now also being rediscovered as an opera composer of genius. Some credit for this must go to Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco, whose performances of Giustino since 1985 have made this colourful and dramatic work the most widely played of Vivaldi's operas in modern times. Giustino contains an endless flow of Vivaldian melodic inspiration and inventive orchestration; the score calls for a psaltery and for birdsong, while the goddess Fortune descends to the tune of Spring from the Four Seasons. This first recording is based on a concert performance in Rotterdam in 2001; the fine cast is headed by Dominique Labelle as the empress Arianna and Francesca Provvisionato as the plough-boy emperor Giustino.

Major share in the pleasure Ziani's oratorio gives, the excellent singer, especially Furio Zanasi, who is David draws sensitively with his velvety soft baritone, and Giampaolo Bassoonto as an agile narrator. At Alan Curtis' sensitive line, they're reaching an er- count density and representational presence, which to breathless listening.

Handel's Giove in Argo (Jupiter in Argos) is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, a pastiche (or, in the parlance of the time, pasticcio) of numbers from earlier operas stitched together into a mythological-pastoral plot that is absurd even by the standards of Baroque opera. It is a notable sign of the success of the Baroque opera revival that this has appeared on a semi-major label, Virgin Classics. The pieces were all from operas that were fairly recent at the time, and it's possible that the work was intended as a kind of greatest-hits reprise, but London audiences did not bite; the opera was long thought to be lost, and it had its modern premiere only in 2006, with newly written recitatives.

One of the very last recordings of baroque-pioneer conductor Alan Curtis (1934-2015), a supreme Handelian conductor and scholar. Alan Curtis, described by the New York Times’ as “one of the great scholar-musicians of recent times”, conducts a brilliant cast including German soprano star Christiane Karg and the Italian mezzo soprano Romina Basso. Christiane Karg is one of those fascinating voices of our time. She is certainly one of today’s most interesting German singers with an international profile. Many of her recordings such as “Scene!”, “Heimliche Aufforderung” or “Portrait” (for Berlin Classics) have been internationally acclaimed and were big commecial successes. A selection of arias, duets and instrumental pieces from Handel masterworks such as Semele, Hercules, Partenope, a.o. With liner notes by the british Handel specialist Dr. David Vickers. Incl. a dedication by mystery writer DONNA LEON, who was a close friend to Alan Curtis.