Emiliano Gonzalez Toro

Alessandro Scarlatti's oratorio Il Martirio di Santa Teodosia is an exciting drama of life, love and death, set in the fourth-century Roman Empire. St. Theodosia of Tyre died at the age of eighteen, in the year 308. Preferring to devote her life to God, Teodosia rejects the love of Arsenio, the son of the Roman governor, and welcomes death. The dramatic strength and vocal beauty of this work flourishes in the hands Emmanuelle de Negri, Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, Anthea Pichanick, Renato Dolcini and the orchestra Les Accents led by Thibault Noally.

Doubtless history has been unkind to many composers. As unkind to Manuel García , truly, as it has been to Joaquín Gaztambide, Cristóbal Oudrid or Rafael Calleja. Doubtless, yes. But there's one point which should be clarified. Manuel García has been stigmatized as the “lost link” between Mozart and Rossini, an intermediate stepping stone towards the “Rossini Style” (!!), and yesterday's Teatro de la Zarzuela offering was duly defined by critics and opera buffs as “ Rossinian ”.

With this new recording, the madly epic and romantic opera, Il Giustino, finally receives its place in the spotlight, something that the history of music has denied it up until now. The fifty-eighth recording and eighteenth opera in the Vivaldi Edition, which began in 2000, solidifies the status of Vivaldi as the greatest of opera composers - and of composers full stop. It needed the talent, charisma and poetic energy of a great conductor to bring back to life this gem, and it is Ottavio Dantone who assumes this mantle.

The name of Louis-Ferdinand Hérold will always be associated with one work, in England at least, and that is his ballet La Fille Mal Gardée. Who can forget the famous Clog Dance in Frederick Ashton’s production, although having watched a German production on VHS some years ago I remember being shocked by its omission. Even allowing for the popularity of this ballet, Le Pré Aux Clercs, commissioned and premiered by the Opéra-Comique in Paris, is regarded as his greatest success; this despite the lead soprano walking out after its premier production.

It's not easy to pinpoint precisely what makes Christina Pluhar and L'Arpeggiata's performances of Baroque music, particularly Monteverdi, so extraordinary and distinctive, even in a time – the early 21st century – when (pardon the oxymoron) exceptionally fine recordings of this repertoire are the rule rather than the exception. One element may be the inventiveness of her realizations of the continuo part.

In commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, La Ritirata and Josetxu Obregon have created a program for Glossa sallying forth on the back of music composed by Antonio Caldara and inspired by El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Manch. Antonio Caldara was neither the first nor the last composer to have his compositional ingenuity sparked off by Cervantes' timeless masterpiece. Interspersed between these vocal contributions are a series of instrumental ballets composed for these operas.