Lausanne

According to Camille Saint-Saëns, Charles Gounod ought to be better known for his church music than for his operas. This gives some idea of the unprecedented quality of his sacred works, to which he devoted not only his unwavering faith but also the highest degree of his musical skill. Gounod s Requiem in particular foreshadows Fauré, Duruflé and Poulenc and constitutes one of the masterpieces of the genre. On this new disc from Mirare, Michel Corboz and the Ensemble Vocal et Instrumentale de Lausanne offer insightful and reverential performances of both the Requiem and the Messe Chorale.

Rossini liked to write operas about women (specifically mezzo-sopranos) who were smarter than the men around them, such as Rosina in "The Barber of Seville" and Angelina in "La Cenerentola." This charming, melodious bit of operatic fluff, composed before either of those two better-known operas, is dedicated to the proposition that an Italian woman is a match for any man or group of men. The thesis is tested in an extreme situation; Isabella (Larmore) is shipwrecked on the coast of a place where shipwrecked Europeans were routinely enslaved and, if they were women, consigned to a harem.

Joseph Haydn the composer of symphonies, string quartets, piano trios, piano sonatas, and a plethora of other instrumental works was also Joseph Haydn the composer, director, and producer of operas. His employer, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, greatly enjoyed opera, and for nearly 20 years Haydn's full-time job was running the theater at Esterháza, the Prince's pleasure palace in Hungary. In the first decade, Haydn wrote 10 operas for his company, the most successful of which ran for 20 performances. In tone, they range from the comic to the semi-serious to the wholly serious, and in quality, they range between the operas of Gluck and Mozart.

There are some real injustices in the business of recorded music and this disc brings one of them very much to light. The opening lines of the liner notes say, "Until relatively recently, the reputation of Alessandro Scarlatti – the son, brother, father and uncle of other illustrious musicians – was overshadowed by that of his son Domenico." It is not stated on this disc whether the notes were written to go with this Apex re-issue or whether they date from the same period as the recording, but Alessandro’s reputation, if he has one, is still very much under his wonderful son’s shadow. It is an indication of a massive injustice, that this re-issue goes some small way to correcting.