Pandapendu L'ete

No less than five brilliant countertenors – including Max Emanuel Cencic and Philippe Jaroussky – join conductor Diego Fasolis and Concerto Köln for Artaserse by Leonardo Vinci (1690-1730). In early 18th century Italy, the Neapolitan-born composer was one of the brightest stars in opera, and Artaserse is considered his masterpiece.

The purely magical, tonal, dancing alto or bass clarinet and soprano saxophone of Louis Sclavis are heard fully on this recording with his quintet, where he explores a variety of ethnically inspired motifs guaranteed to delight one and all. Where improvisation has always been his strong suit, here it is relegated to solos, as his written music takes center stage. Fellow front-liner Matthieu Metzger plays alto and soprano sax – together he and Sclavis create a whirling dervish cone of sound that reflects a definite European stance removed from American jazz.

This collection of arias from the operas Il Tigrane, Poro, La Sofonisba, L’Ippolito is a testimony of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera activity from the year 1743 to 1745. At the age of 30, yet already successful composer, Gluck wrote his operas for the most important events in the cities of Crema, Turin and Milan, almost without a break. He seems to be at the peak of his career, yet he has not created those great compositions such as Orpheus and Euridice, Paride ed Elena, Alceste, that would have linked his name to the reform of opera theorised together with Ranieri de’ Calzabigi and which made him one of the immortal names in the music history.

On the strength of the immense success of Dido & Aeneas and King Arthur, in 1692 Purcell went on to produce The Fairy Queen, based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. The work is, in fact, a ‘semi-opera’, or ‘opera with dialogue’, in which only some of the crucial scenes are provided with music. But this version of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream by the ‘Orpheus Britannicus’ became almost as famous as the play that inspired it, with its love scenes, its supernatural scenes and its innate sense of musical humour investing it with an irresistible savour and enchantment.This title was released for the first time in 1989.

This recording of Artaserse by Leonardo Vinci (1690-1730) – born in Naples and, during his short life, celebrated as one of Italy’s leading composers of opera – represents the fourth Virgin Classics collaboration between countertenor Max Emanuel Cencic and conductor Diego Fasolis. It follows an album of Handel arias, Handel’s opera Faramondo and, in 2011, Vivaldi’s opera Farnace – “The performance fairly crackles, with accomplished singing by the flamboyant countertenor Max Emanuel Cencic in the virtuoso title role,” said the Telegraph in the UK…

(Forum Opéra, France.)

Among the great instrumental composers who were active in Italy in the 18th century, Giuseppe Tartini (Pirano d’Istria, 1692 - Padova, 1770) is the one who most explicitly focussed his production on his own chosen instrument, the violin, neglecting genres that in his day were very popular. 135 violin concertos and about 200 sonatas for violin and basso continuo form, in fact, the main bulk of his output. The Arte dell’Arco ensemble, who have met with great success with this series, measure themselves once again with Tartini’s beautiful and difficult concertos, all works recorded here for the first time.

The box-set traces the history of Archiv from 1947, when the first recordings were made (Helmut Walcha playing Bach organ works), to a bonus CD featuring selections from the new 2013 albums mentioned above. A complete overview is appended. In between comes a sequence of albums several of which are new to CD from the great names of the label, from Walcha, Wenzinger and Safford Cape, through Karl Richter, Nikolas Harnoncourt and Sir Charles Mackerras…