Victor Torres

This is a great set. The main competition to this production comes from Gardiner, with Anthony Rolfe Johnson as Orfeo. His is a superbly attractive voice, and he remains the best Orfeo I've heard. But Victor Torres is excellent too and his performance is very distinctive and rich in character. What's more, he is better recorded, as is the whole of Garrido's interpretation…”

In 1646, France's first minister, Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin, eager to bring Italian culture to Paris, hired Luigi Rossi to write an opera for the Paris carnival. The premiére was given a magnificent staging and the performance, which lasted six hours, was a triumph. However, the expense of the performance only stoked discontent against Mazarin, which soon broke out into full-scale popular rebellion. On this video, Raphaël Pichon and Ensemble Pygmalion recreate the magic of that first performance, thanks to a skillful musical reconstruction and the group's vibrant, multi-colored timbre. The dramatic power of the myth of Orpheus is brilliantly conveyed in Jetske Mijnssen's production, which transposes the story into contemporary terms, to evoke the timeless experience of love and death that humanity both desires and fears.

A unique and solemn spell seems to shroud every spot as soon as Portuguese alchemists Moonspell enter the stage – and it was a very special evening indeed when the band played an exceptional show at the Campo Pequeno arena in their hometown Lissabon on February 4th, 2017…