Il matrimonio segreto is the only opera that has ever had the honor of being repeated in full at its premiere, so very much did the comical musical goings-on please its distinguished audience. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Innsbruck Early Music Festival Weeks, the conductor Alessandro De Marchi again at long last led a performance of Cimarosa’s most popular opera in historical performance practice and in original sound.

Vivaldi may be best remembered for his virtuosic concertos but, as anyone familiar with his famous D major Gloria will know, he also had a real ear for vocal sonorities. His only surviving oratorio, Juditha Triumphans, has until recently been a well-kept secret. The biblical story of Judith overcoming Holofernes and his army (beheading him herself–no shrinking violet she) was popular with both librettists and composers, offering plenty of opportunities for exuberant tub-thumping. And these Vivaldi seizes eagerly, the opening rabble-rousing chorus (here preceded by a sinfonia reconstructed by Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot) setting the tone in truly martial fashion.

Orlando finto pazzo ('Orlando feigns madness') was the second of Vivaldi's numerous operas, and his first for the Venetian stage. The story of Orlando's madness is taken not from the usual source, Ariosto's poem Orlando furioso, but Boiardo's earlier Orlando innamorato, a similarly tragicomic mix of love, intrigue and magic. In Ariosto's poem Orlando's madness is real, but here he pretends it for no obvious reason; in fact it's no more than a couple of episodes in a convoluted and unengaging plot built around a lovepentangle (no less), and further complicated by various disguises and rampant dissembling.

This new Dynamic opera, Elisir d’amore was performed in Donizetti’s native city of Bergamo, during the most important world festival dedicated to the Italian composer. The opera is set in a rural environment and the action takes place in a country farm. It is a brilliant comedy with many points of contact with semi-serious operas. The choice of this subject must have been strongly influenced by the successes of Vincenzo Bellini’s La Sonnambula.

CANTATAS AND OPERAS – the twin pillars of secular vocal music of the baroque period. Few composers – though there are some notable exceptions – eschewed these genres if only because a set of cantatas, engraved or copied professionally and strategically dedicated, could be a comparatively inexpensive starting point for a career while opera lured with prospects of fame and fortune.

“Carmelite Vespers 1709” presents a reconstruction of musical performances in Rome in 1709, based on a new critical edition by Italian Handel expert Angela Romagnoli. In early 18th century-Rome the holiday of Madonna del Carmine was celebrated with a lavish musical pasticcio. Italian Early Music specialist Alessandro de Marchi, his Academia Montis Regalis and an excellent ensemble of solo vocalists present the reconstruction of such a service as it might have been performed in 1709 under the direction of Venetian master Antonio Caldara (1670–1736).

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 novelties here are the Mattheson works, the first two fully composed, the third a figured-bass exercise from Mattheson's treatise on the subject. The sonata is a dramatic, virtuoso outing in the Italian style; the suite, ostensibly more french in character, retains a typical German heaviness.

Stradella was murdered in Genoa when he was forty-two years old. Until then he enjoyed a dazzling career as a freelance composer, writing on commission, collaborating with distinguished poets, producing over three hundred works in a variety of genres. His musical style is distinctive, characterized by fluid lines, great skill in counterpoint, and harmony which was tonal but which occasionally offers chords that were unusual then and striking even today.

Argentine countertenor Franco Fagioli has emerged as one of the rising figures in that hot field, seemingly with the Italian opera of the first half of the 18th century as a specialty. As such, he might be particularly well represented by this collection of arias by Nicola Porpora, whose activities cut across a cross section of important activities in the century's second quarter. He was the teacher of both Haydn and Farinelli. He snagged many of Pietro Metastasio's high-tragedy opera seria libretti for himself and set them with suitably florid music, but he also had a considerable for sheer melody that's on display in this well-chosen program. Fagioli is not an exceptionally powerful countertenor, but he's capable of sheer smoothness of line that's appropriate to Porpora, who was called the greatest teacher of singers among composers, and the greatest composer among teachers of singing.

Since 2001, beginning with Juditha Triumphans, eight operas by Vivaldi have been released in the Vivaldi Edition, each one an event, either the first complete recording (or the first recording!) by first-rate conductors, soloists and orchestras specializing in Baroque. Acclaimed by the press (numerous awards), and by the public (more than 150,000 copies sold since 2001), these recordings have succeeded at last in rehabilitating Antonio Vivaldi, known always for his brilliant concertos, as one of the greatest operatic composers of all time.

The first complete and unabridged recording of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s operatic masterpiece, as well as the world-premiere recording on period instruments, undertaken by the critically acclaimed 2010 production from the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, known as the “Bayreuth of Baroque Opera”. In his all too brief career Pergolesi, who died in 1736 aged only 26, set the course for 18th century opera. His works, especially L’Olimpiade, which was first performed in 1735, introduced a new and sentimental tone to the opera stage. Based on one of the most popular subject matters of opera seria, Pergolesi’s masterpiece L’Olimpiade offers a drama of love and intrigue coupled with highly virtuoso singing. Presenting Italian conductor Alessandro de Marchi, one of the most sought-after Early Music specialists, and a stunning cast of top-league international Baroque singers.

This live recording of Georg Philipp Telemann's "Flavius 'Bertaridus" is a rarity: The performance at the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music has been hailed by critics and frenetic. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described this world premiere recording under the direction of Alessandro di Marchi - one of the leading specialists in historical performance practice. As "a milestone in German music history," "Not a single scene, no aria want to miss it," the Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes to di Marchis spectacular interpretation with orchestra and chorus of the Academia Montis Regalis. The opera is entirely filled with wonderful singers like Maite Beaumont, Ann-Beth Solvang and Nina Bernstein.

The banning of opera performances during Lent in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rome meant that composers had to turn their attention to biblical subjects. However there is no sense that either composer or librettist felt at all limited in their subject matter, judging from the extraordinarily inventive oratorios that were produced during this time. Scarlatti’s work tells the dramatic story of David and Goliath. Whilst the biblical account relays the story in a few sentences, the anonymous librettist of Davidis pugna et victoria expands upon these to create an extensive libretto, with the characters fully developed and explored.

During the early nineteenth century the new 1804 Viennese version of La Clemenza di Tito, was Mozart's most popular opera in Europe. However, in keeping with the practice during that period, it was performed in versions adapted to the times and the taste of the opera public and this is precisely the starting point for our recording's conductor Alessandro De Marchi. He would like to present Tito in the form in which it was staged and acclaimed in great houses from the Vienna Court Opera to the Milan Scala and from Dresden and Hamburg to Paris during the early years of the nineteenth century. Our recording is based on the acclaimed production at the Innsbruck Festival Weeks 2013 with the Academia Montis Regalis performing on historical instruments.