Opera 2023

While so many rock bands try to reinvent themselves with every new album, Cake has made a name for itself by sticking to its brand of smirking funk-pop.

Exquisite eloquence from Australia's foremost Baroque and Classical flute virtuoso, Melissa Farrow. Well known to Australian audiences as a featured artist with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Australian Haydn Ensemble and Pinchgut Opera, this is her first solo album: a deep dive into the elegant musical salons of early 19th-century Vienna. Sublime melodies, joyous virtuosity, and delicate nuances of colour: Farrow plays the nine-key instrument prized by composers of the day, where each note has multiple possible fingerings, each with its own subtle shades of timbre. Capable of expressing a vast range of emotions, the instrument was, as the great German Romantic Jean Paul described it, ‘a divining rod, plumbing the depths of the soul.’

Following the critical success that greeted his Odradek debut album Exodus (music by Korngold and Zeisl), violinist Johannes Fleischmann, known as the 'Viennese Violinist', returns in the company of pianist Christoph Ulrich Meier with Solitaire.

Jean-Baptiste Lully’s unrivalled position at the Sun King’s court gave him freedom to produce numerous grand theatre works. Acis et Galatée is acknowledged as one of his masterpieces with its adroit alternation of effects and situations and its substantial use of dances and choruses.

With Thésée, Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques continue their tour of Lully's operas, in which they have become specialists. Lully's third musical tragedy, and one of the least recorded, Thésée recounts the hero's youth, long before his battle with the Minotaur or his intrigues with Ariadne and Phèdre. The story takes the listener on a journey through a series of changing settings - from the underworld to the island of paradise, from Versailles to Athens - supported by the incredible vocal eloquence of Lully's music, underpinned by a constant and hitherto unrivalled tension.

Pianist Sheng Cai devotes his latest recording to piano works by the renowned Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Witness to a solid and emblazoned tradition, Giacomo Miluccio (1918-1998), knew how to combine all those souls thai distinguished Neapolitan-trained artists for centuries. Ceaseless study led him to master the instrument with that mastership exhibited with "natu ralness " and "simplicity "; he generously instructed a group of instrumentalists and constantly showed his performative vocation among the ranks of the centuries-old Sancarlian orchestra as well as in solo and chamber music.

Supplementary to his legendary Beethoven cycles for Decca are Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt’s recordings for Philips, Mercury, Deutsche Grammophon and Accord.

The artists will present pulsating songs saturated with the influences of American musicians: Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, Luther Vandross, Donny Hathaway.

'It would be difficult to find a simpler and more poignant subject', Massenet remarked during the composition of Ariane, a vast score in five acts premiered at the Paris Opera in October 1906. The libretto by Catulle Mendes is part ancient drama, part symbolist poem, and sets Phaedra and Ariadne, two sisters in love with Theseus, in violent conflict with each other. This epic work does not shrink from relating the combat against the Minotaur, from showing a ship tossed by the raging billows, nor even from transporting the audience to the Underworld where Persephone reigns.