Concerto Koln

“This magnificent production is a complete and blissful success. Don’t miss it.” Those were the words of the French website Classique News when Leonardo Vinci’s rediscovered Artaserse was staged by Silviu Purcãrete at the Opéra National de Lorraine in Nancy. Complementing the CD version of the opera released in Autumn 2012, this DVD features no fewer than five of the world’s leading countertenors – assuming both male and female roles: Philippe Jaroussky, Max Emanuel Cencic, Franco Fagioli, Valer Barna-Sabadus and Yuriy Mynenko.

Carl Heinrich Graun was court composer to Frederick the Great of Prussia, and this opera was chosen to open the new opera house in Berlin in 1742. It was a great success, but Handel's opera on the same subject had appeared less than two decades before, and had anyone been familiar with that one, Graun's might have come as a disappointment. Handel gets under his characters' skins–Cleopatra's eight arias tell us everything we have to know about her, for instance–while Graun (merely) offers some beautiful, well-orchestrated, at-times exciting music. Any composer would have been proud to compose Cesare's heart-stoppingly vengeful last-act aria "Voglio strage", and any Read more mezzo (or castrato or countertenor) would be happy to sing it. Here, Iris Vermillion is spectacular, and elsewhere in the opera she's as heroic, romantic, and colorful as our hero ought to be… Robert Levine

This hilarious contemporary version of Francesco Cavalli’s baroque opera Hercules in Love was commissioned on occasion of the marriage of Louis XIV, the Sun King, to Maria Theresa of Spain. The original production took two years to complete and was at the time the greatest show ever performed in Europe…

The versatile Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado, whose international profile has been rising in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years, seems to tackle all genres with alacrity, but Baroque period-instrument performance is his main calling card. He's a great choice, then, for the re-launch of Deutsche Grammophon’s Archiv Produktion imprint, with this disc of orchestral music associated with Farinelli’s long tenure at the Spanish court -much of it dug out of archives and recorded for the first time.

Just before returning home at the end of his years of musical apprenticeship in Rome, the Portuguese composer Almeida composed this unusual oratorio based on one of the most bloddy episodes in the Old Testament, the decapitation of the Assyrian general Holofernes by Judith, a crucial episode in the struggle of the Jewis people against Nebuchadnezzar (588 B.C.). When it was revived in 1990 this powerful, at times sensual work was greeted as a 'revelation of Portuguese music'.

Kaum ein anderes Werk der Musikgeschichte ist so voller Geheimnisse wie Mozarts Requiem: Vom ominösen Auftraggeber bis zur immer wieder geäußerten Kritik an der Vervollständigung des Fragments durch den Mozart-Schüler Süßmayr. Die Quellenlage ist unübersichtlich, neben Süßmayr waren noch weitere ›Vervollständiger‹ mit am Werk, das Witwe Constanze als eines von Mozart allein veröffentlichen wollte.

Solemn A minor Largo precedes capricious A major Allegro di molto first movement with false recapitulation. Immediately corroborated is Newell Jenkins’s verdict that this symphony is ‘certainly one of the most curious and exceptional of all [Gaetano] Brunetti’s works’. Then there is his unique hallmark—of minuet and trio invariably discarded for a wind Quintetto (here in A) plus a trio for strings (A minor), both in 2/4. Revel in discovery.