Johann Strauss Jr. il Pipistrello Ita

Performances from Pamela Coburn, Brigitte Fassbaender, Janet Perry, Eberhard Wachter, the Choir und Ballet der Bayerischen Staatsoper, and the Bayerisches Staatsorchester. Rosalinde, wife of Eisenstein, is having an affair with Alfred. Eisenstein is due to begin a prison sentence the next morning, and the prison governor, Frank, is expected to collect him at any moment. However, Eisenstein allows himself to be talked into attending a fancy dress ball by Dr Falke, and when Frank arrives to find Alfred with Rosalinde, he assumes him to be Eisenstein and carts him off to prison.

Franz Hauk and the Simon Mayr Chorus and Ensemble have spearheaded the revival of the music of Johann Simon Mayr who was born in Bavaria but lived in Italy. In the latest instalment of their critically acclaimed recordings they turn to Il sogno di Partenope, an allegorical staged cantata composed to mark the rebuilding of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples following a fire in February 1816. Mayr’s significance as an intermediary between the opera seria of the late eighteenth-century and the melodrama of the early-nineteenth is reflected in this important work, a unique kind of ‘cantata opera’ of which only the second act survives.

This album is full of surprises, not all of them associated with its musical contents. Advance PR materials stated that its contents were recorded originally for televised broadcast in 2004, then forgotten, and only just rediscovered. A final recording by the celebrated Musica Antiqua Köln, forgotten by its The music is a bit of a surprise as well, if not the result of an “original genius” that Goebel likens to C. P. E. Bach. Johann Friedrich Meister (1638–97) seems by all accounts to have been something of a rebel, getting himself imprisoned the year after his appointment as music director of the Hofkapelle of Duke Ferdinand Albrecht I of Brunswick-Lüneburg.

In the last period of his life, Hasse, together with Faustina Bordoni, settled in Venice. At this time, he devotes himself almost exclusively to composing sacred music. However, in 1775 - 1776, two remarkable cantatas, written on the text of his friend Pietro Metastasio, saw the light.