This album of Baroque cantatas and chamber duets grew out of a 2007 performance of Stefano Landi's 1631 opera Il Sant'Alessio starring Philippe Jaroussky and Max Emanuel Cencic (among the eight countertenors in the cast) with William Christie conducting Les Arts Florissants. Christie was so impressed with the blend of Jaroussky and Cencic's voices that he brought them together to explore the vast and rarely performed repertoire of late 17th and early 18th century Italian duets for equal voices.

A curious appendix in a couple of the Handel Gesellschaft volumes offers ornamental harpsichord arrangements by William Babell of airs from Handel operas. He in fact published a large number of versions of extracts from popular operas of the time, and these gained wide circulation both in this country and abroad in collections aimed at genteel young ladies (for whom a modest competence at the keyboard was a social asset). The transcriptions from Handel's Rinaldo (1711) are so elaborately smothered in brilliant scales, arpeggios and other embellishments that Hawkins averred that ''few could play the lessons but himself'', and Burney acidly commented that Babell ''acquired great celebrity without the assistance of taste''; but the versions of works by other composers that had been produced in London in 1709 and 1710 are much less ornate and were clearly designed for players of modest attainments.

Founded in 1719 as the first opera company in the English-speaking world, the Royal Academy of Music commissioned and premiered some of the finest 18th-century operas, including Handel's Giulio Cesare. On this exciting album, renowned American countertenor Lawrence Zazzo is joined by La Nuova Musica and David Bates for a snapshot of the Academy's hits circa 1725 featuring arias by Handel, Ariosti and Bononcini.

Raymond Leppard, CBE (born 11 August 1927, London, England - died 22 October 2019, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA) was an English-American conductor, harpsichordist, composer & editor. In the 1960s, he played a prime role in the rebirth of interest in Baroque music. he was appointed Music Director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1987 (a position which he held for fourteen years).

A 20 ans, avant d'être célèbre dans toute l'Europe et de venir à Londres se mesurer à Haendel, ce natif de Modène (1670-1747) composa cet oratorio précoce. Il y témoigne d'une capacité évidente à dépasser ses modèles: les airs sont inspirés, l'écriture instrumentale habile et la figure de Marie-Madeleine ainsi mise en musique a toute l'ambiguïté de la sensualité séductrice et du repentir édificateur.

Scion of one of Italy’s most musical 17th-century families, Giovanni Bononcini became such a force in an era when the oratorio was king that he rivaled Handel in popularity across the continent. Venturing from Italy to England and back again, Bononcini was branded something of a political malcontent, though the music heard in this set has all of the political dogma of a John Clare poem: which is to say, none at all, a music of mead and meadow, an image that I assume the sylphs on the booklet’s cover are meant to conjure in their contented gazes.

Simone Kermes, crowned “The Queen of Baroque” by Opera News, presents her eagerly awaited follow-up album to her multi-award-winning album Lava, which was Editor’s Choice in Gramophone and Disc of the Month in BBC Music Magazine. Colori d'Amore (The Colours Of Love) is a selection of virtuosic baroque arias bound together by the theme of love, almost all of which are world premiere recordings, having been unjustly neglected for centuries.

London Baroque offers another installment in its ongoing European Trio Sonata series, this time devoted to 18th-century Italy; as with the ensemble’s previous efforts the program features generally excellent performances of lesser-known repertoire. Ten years ago I reviewed a similar 18th-century Italian program by this same group titled “Stravaganze Napoletane”, also on BIS, and was generally impressed with the performances–except for one piece: Domenico Gallo’s Sonata No. 1 in G major.

Giovanni Battista Bononcini (1670-1747) and his younger brother, Antonio Maria (1677-1726) were considered by their contemporaries to be among the most outstanding cello virtuosi of their time; today, however, they are best known not only as composers of vocal music but also as two of the greatest representatives of the galant style. It is to their music, often unpublished, that Marco Ceccato and his Accademia introduce us here.

Este fantástico disco pensado especialmente para los amantes del Barroco, muestra la realidad de la música teatral española al despuntar el siglo XVIII. Con un poderío instrumental impresionante, unos arreglos hermosos y mucho talento, el disco propuesto por el director Fahmi Alqhai al frente de su Accademia del Piacere deja claro cómo el estilo italiano arraiga en España de mano de la corte borbónica fundiéndose con los ritmos y armonías locales que tanto influyeron en Sebastián Durón, uno de los nombres fundamentales de la renovación de la música española del momento.

Contralto Nathalie Stutzmann shines a light on the deep-voiced female singers of the Baroque era, often overshadowed by the extravagant talents and reputations of castrato singers like Farinelli and Caffarelli. Her programme of Handel, Vivaldi, Porpora, Bononcini, Caldara and Gasparini displays the variety of operatic roles – both female and male – assumed by contraltos like Vittoria Tesi and Anna Marchesini. “We must remember that the opera composers of the early 18th century saw the female contralto and the male castrato as vocally interchangeable,” says Stutzmann, “and that the voice most closely resembling a castrato is not the countertenor – produced using a falsetto technique – but the contralto, which is a natural voice.” Stutzmann both sings and conducts Orfeo 55, the instrumental ensemble she founded a decade ago