Opera 2023

Vivaldi was already a renowned opera composer in Venice and throughout Italy, but he gained exceptional notoriety throughout Europe when the concerti constituting his Quattro Stagioni were published in Amsterdam.

This is the long-awaited second album from Swedish jazz pianist Emil Ingmar, building on the critically acclaimed debut album from 2020.

Violist Chiu-Chen Liu enjoys a diverse career in orchestra, chamber music and pedagogy. Recent performances include engagements with Cremona International Music Academy, Alion Baltic International Music Festival, Festival Suoni D’abruzzo in Italy, BAMcafé Live, American Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, American Chamber Music Ensemble, New York Classical Quartet, Attacca Quartet and Lecture-Performance Series at Columbia University. Chiu-Chen has served as principal viola with the Greater Bridgeport Symphony, the Sarasota Opera, Di Capo Opera, Fairfield County Chorale Orchestra. Her chamber music performances have been broadcast on NPR and WQXR radio.

Georg Philipp Telemann was a German Baroque composer and multi-instrumentalist. He is one of the most prolific composers in history, at least in terms of surviving oeuvre. Telemann was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the leading German composers of the time, and he was compared favourably both to his friend Johann Sebastian Bach, who made Telemann the godfather and namesake of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and to George Frideric Handel, whom Telemann also knew personally.

Rafal Blechacz has been deeply associated with the music of Fryderyk Chopin across his whole career. His devotion to the music of his great compatriot began long before 2005 when he won the Warsaw Chopin Competition. Blechacz complements the two large works with Chopin's haunting F sharp minor Nocturne and his exquisite Barcarolle.

“A lifetime of performing Messiah has brought me enough courage to record this singularly famous piece of music. With the finest musicians and soloists on the planet surrounding me, I’m finally ready to lay down my personal interpretation for posterity.”

Roderick Williams heads up the cast for this new recording of Delius' A Mass of Life with the Bergen Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Mark Elder. Accompanied by soloists Gemma Summerfield, Claudia Huckle and Bror Magnus Todenes, the Bergen Philharmonic Choir and Edvard Grieg Kor join Collegium Musicum Choir to complete the tour de force needed to perform and record this monumental work.

‘So Romantique !’ illustrates the ‘profoundly sentimental’ side of French opera from the 1830s to the 1900s, which gradually came to be judged overwrought and was condemned to partial oblivion. ‘I am convinced that this is because the principals of interpretation were lost’, says the tenor Cyrille Dubois.

Francesco Cavalli succeeded Monteverdi as the most influential composer of the new genre of opera that emerged in mid-17th-century Venice. Il Xerse is a fictitious dramma per musica that tells of Persian King Xerxes’ love for Romilda, who in turn is in love with his brother Arsamene. The plot is an entertaining and extremely intricate human comedy of crossed loves, court intrigues and disguises – the work’s popularity saw it staged in Paris at the wedding of Louis XIV and Maria Theresa of Spain. Since overshadowed by Handel’s later Xerxes, this Martina Franca production is the first in modern times.

‘Così amor mi fai languir’ is the title of an aria from the opera La forza dell’amor paterno by Alessandro Stradella, a composer who distinguished himself not only in the field of opera, but also in an even more prolific genre that is today much less popular: the cantata, a wonderful laboratory for creation and exploration. This CD presents a superb selection of little known works, here recorded for the first time, which cover the full expressive palette of amorous feelings.