Fabio Nicolucci

Presented by the Festival della Valle d’Itria, this is the first modern-day staging of Leonardo Leo’s Neapolitan revision of Handel’s Rinaldo, a pastiche with a Mediterranean allure, which was composed in 1718 but considered lost until a few years ago. The story behind this rare opera is fascinating: the score of Handel’s masterpiece was brought illegally to Naples by the castrato singer Nicolò Grimaldi, who had performed Rinaldo in London. Once in Italy, the work was given a makeover by local composers, including Leo, who adapted it to the taste of the Neapolitan public, adding intermezzos and amusing characters.

The chamber cantata flourished in Italy as a counterpart to public opera and oratorio, cultivated by aristocratic patrons for their personal enjoyment. Perhaps because of its essentially private origins, this pervasive Baroque form remains little known today. During his years in Italy (1706-1710), George Frideric Handel composed nearly 100 cantatas for a series of important patrons, but they have tended to be passed over in favour of his larger operas, oratorios, concertos and orchestral suites.

Like alchemists of old, attempting to recombine the four elements, here Fábio Brum presents four distinct musical languages in a programme forged during lockdown. Gabriele Roberto’s Tokyo Suite charts the astonishment of a traveller dazzled by the vast megapolis, whereas Dimitri Cervo’s The Brazilian Four Seasons offers a colourful, energetic panorama of the natural and human worlds. Fábio Brum’s very personal musical journey is highlighted by the contrast between the Talmudic contemplation of Menachem Zur’s De Profundis and the abstract ruminations of Nicola Tescari’s Trumpet Concerto ‘Nine Moods’.

After personal tragedies and the fiasco of his last opera Un giorno di regno, Verdi wanted to give up composing for ever. Fortunately he made a further attempt: Nabucco. His first real success, the first genuine “Verdi opera”, was born. Nabucco – the complex story of Nebuchadnezzar the King of Babylon, who proclaims himself God and is hereon affl icted with madness – remains a success with audiences. The renowned director Günter Krämer paid particular attention to the interpersonal component of the opera accentuating the conflict-ridden king’s loss of power as the core.

The soprano Daniela Dessì died suddenly on 20th August 2016, aged 59. She was hailed by critics and colleagues as one of the finest voices the world of opera has ever known. Dynamic pays tribute to the great soprano with this recording, filmed just one year before her untimely death. Her performance of Giordano’s Fedora was one of the pinnacles of her stunning artistic career. In the famous aria O grandi occhi lucenti from Act One, she delivers a technically perfect and emotionally passionate performance worthy of a great star. The story takes place at the end of the 19th century, in St. Petersburg (Act One), Paris (Act Two) and Switzerland (Act Three).

Sandrine Piau does it again or should I say she did it already! This collection of superb Handel arias from '96 could be considered an earlier version or forerunner of the recently released Handel Opera Seria, and certainly very complementary to it. The ensemble she plays with is different (Fabio Bondi and his charismatic Europa Galante players), possibly somewhat less refined from the "early music" style perspective but this consideration is blown away by the dramatic presence and the stellar precision of this non-pareil Baroque vocalist.

This is the world-premiere recording of L’Oracolo in Messenia, an opera prepared by Vivaldi for Vienna and now reconstructed by Fabio Biondi. He leads this triumphant performance, which opened the 2011 Resonanzen festival in the Austrian capital with a high-powered cast including Ann Hallenberg, Vivica Genaux and rising soprano Julia Lezhneva.

La virtù de’ strali d’Amore was the first of ten operas Cavalli wrote with librettist Giovanni Faustini. Set in Cyprus, the plot involves enchanted and pastoral elements, love and its thwarting, the counterpointing of Man and God, sorcery, revelation and ultimate resolution, all accomplished in a brilliant series of scenes. A follower of Monteverdi, Cavalli reveals the influence of the older man but also his own pronounced independence. Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante have become one of the most admired partnerships in the history of baroque music performance.