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La Compagnia del Madrigale releases another imaginative album on Glossa, turning to a late composition by Orazio Vecchi, Le veglie di Siena from 1604.

La Compagnia del Madrigale releases another imaginative album on Glossa, turning to a late composition by Orazio Vecchi, Le veglie di Siena from 1604.

This recording of La Sonnambula is notable on a number of fronts. It's the first recording of the opera based on a 2004 critical edition of the score that confirms the leading role was indeed written for a mezzo-soprano, although it has been performed by sopranos for much of its history. (Among the first Aminas were the celebrated mezzos Giuditta Pasta and Maria Malibran.) It's also the first recording using period instruments, in this case Orchestra La Scintilla, based at the Basel Opera and conducted by Alessandro de Marchi in an idiomatic and lively reading. And, as the promotional materials trumpet, it's the first recorded collaboration between superstars Cecilia Bartoli and Juan Diego Flórez. Although less hoopla is made of him, the recording also features a superbly lyrical performance by baritone Ildebrando D'Arcangelo.

The extraordinary series of 1998-2006 recordings of the nine published books of madrigals by Monteverdi, from Claudio Cavina and the Italian ensemble La Venexiana, is now available in limited-time and limited-number boxed set form from Glossa. This multi-award-winning cycle set new standards in textual declamation, rhetorical color and harmonic refinement. Also included is the Live in Corsica album of Monteverdi madrigals (2002) and a newly-written essay by original series essayist Stefano Russomanno of which all, along with full texts and translations in PDF form, are also included.

Linn's Vivaldi: L'Amore per Elvira, featuring the English group La Serenissima under the direction of Adrian Chandler, has quite a bit to offer the Vivaldi fancier. First are Chandler's excellent reconstructions of two of the fragmentary "Graz" violin sonatas that have not come down with their continuo parts intact. Chandler has filled in the missing music with entirely satisfactory replacements that appear to be seamlessly Vivaldian, rendering these works into a listenable form for the first time.

Roman accounts of the nobleman Kapsperger reveal a highly eccentric musician: a virtuoso theorbist, a singer, a successful composer, he was said to be arrogant, even irascible. A character straight out of a novel, as the musicians of L’Escadron Volant de la Reine present him in their first album on harmonia mundi, aided and abetted by a distinguished partner: on this colourful disc, the madrigals, villanellas and arias of ‘Il Tedeschino’ (The German) meet the literary fantasy of the writer Carl Norac.