Mia Vita Mio Bene

Hermes Opernlexikon: "Callas as a fascinatingly disciplined ensemble member;Stabile in a post-war recording as a reminder of his great past;Rossi-Lemeni's demonstration of a quasi-graceful wit - all that makes these discs very precious."

Callas's two comic roles were both in operas by Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia and Il turco in Italia. She first played the capricious and flirtatious Fiorilla - a married Neapolitan woman who takes up with a visiting Turk - in Rome in 1950. Five years later, at La Scala, she appeared in a production by Franco Zeffirelli, also, famously, the director of her Covent Garden Tosca and Paris Norma. Gramophone wrote: 'Callas acts vividly, chiding, boasting, melting, and when in typical Rossinian style she is given a 'key' figure, each repetition of it carries, so one thinks, a slightly different meaning. I found myself teased by memories of these little phrases for hours afterwards'.

After his acclaimed explorations of such Handel operas as Giulio Cesare and Rinaldo, René Jacobs now tackles the first great operatic success of the ‘caro Sassone’ (Venice, 1710), the climax of his Italian period. This version reconstructs the work in its original conception, the only one to combine explosive topicality with extreme dramatic cogency. As a result, this tale of amorous intrigues against a background of Roman history, the ‘prequel’ to Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, emerges more fascinating than ever.

Fully integrated with the musical line, the singers avoid melodrama through intimate, small gestures as if acting for screen, not stage.’ Gramophone Critics' Choice 2021 Paul Agnew and Les Arts Florissants conclude their exploration of this fascinating corpus. Even more than in his first books, Gesualdo here displays incredible modernity, playing in inimitable fashion on dissonances and chromaticisms. Love and death, joys and sorrows embrace and clash amid ever bolder harmonies.

Born in Cremona in 1567, Claudio Monteverdi served at the court of the Dukes of Mantua from the early 1590s until 1612, when he moved to Venice as maestro di cappella at the basilica of St Mark, a position he retained until his death in 1643.

Per voi ardo præsenterer et stort antal italienske madrigaler i den form, de er bevaret i Spanien i vihuela bøger af Enríquez de Valderrábano (1547), Diego Pisador (1552) og Miguel de Fuenllana (1554).

Mozart was just 14 years old when he composed Mitridate, re di Ponto for performance in Milan. An opera seria set in ancient times, it boasts a sequence of spectacular arias for its cast of strongly contrasting characters. At the centre of the action is Mitridate himself – the historical Mithridatus, King of Pontus, a ruler of Persian-Greek ancestry who was a formidable opponent of the Roman empire.

Mozart was just 14 years old when he composed Mitridate, re di Ponto for performance in Milan. An opera seria set in ancient times, it boasts a sequence of spectacular arias for its cast of strongly contrasting characters. At the centre of the action is Mitridate himself – the historical Mithridatus, King of Pontus, a ruler of Persian-Greek ancestry who was a formidable opponent of the Roman empire.

Callas’s first stage appearances in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera came at La Scala in 1957, a year in which Milan also saw her in La sonnambula and Anna Bolena. As in this recording, made the year before, she shared Verdi’s most spectacular soprano-tenor duet (in Act II) with Giuseppe di Stefano. This was the last time Callas and Di Stefano appeared together in opera, though they reunited in the 1970s to direct I vespri siciliani in Turin and to give a series of joint concerts in Europe, the USA, Canada,South Korea and Japan. Gramophone judged this recording of Ballo to be ‘one of Callas’s most compelling assumptions’.

The countertenor Tim Mead leads an all-star cast in the Early Opera Company’s recording of Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula, conducted by Christian Curnyn.