Maria Eckermann

Since (at least) the Greeks, humorists, moralists and satirists have been fascinated by the artistic game of inversion, of “the world turned upside down”, which is how one might translate the title of this largely forgotten opera by Salieri. It here gets its first ever recording. Present an image of society turned on its head and you enable your audience/reader/viewer to see the actual way of things in a whole new light. Your aims may be to expose the follies and errors of the actual, to propose a better way of doing things, or simply to get some laughs from the resulting improbabilities and surprises - or, of course, a mixture of all these motives and more.

Don Giovanni’s special amalgam of dark drama and sparkling comedy is captured with startling immediacy by Carlo Maria Giulini. The Viennese baritone Eberhard Wächter faces a particularly formidable pair of noble ladies: Donna Anna in the form of Joan Sutherland (in one of her rare recordings for a label other than Decca) and the Donna Elvira of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

An innovator and a revolutionary composer, its thanks to the Red Priest that the solo concerto made its way through Europe, influencing the likes of J. S. Bach and Handel and the subsequent course of music history. Published in 1714 (or 1716 as most scholars today tend to believe) and reprinted illegally numerous times in pre-copyright Europe, La Stravaganza, Op. 4 contains 12 solo concertos which can be defined as unsurpassed models of their kind, and the manifesto of Vivaldis aesthetic.