Anna Bonitatibus (born in Potenza) is an Italian mezzo-soprano. She is one of the most wanted mezzo-sopranos of our time, admired in particular for her interpretations of roles by Rossini and Mozart. The music on this new album spans from 18th century (Jommelli, Caldara, Porpora) until early 19th century (Meyerbeer, Rossini, Garcia). Most of the arias and scenes are WORLD PREMIERE RECORDINGS. Some pieces are even performed for the first time after more than 150 years. ANNA BONITATIBUS is one of the best mezzo-sopranos of our time, well trained in performing in a "historically informed" manner. A very special highlight: A Semiramide aria (“Preghiera”) by Manuel Garcia. He has been the first Almaviva in Rossini's “Il Barbiere di Siviglia”. He was an amazing composer as well: he composed a Semiramide after Rossini that everybody considered lost. The score was discovered and newly edited by Anna Bonitatibus.

The Venice Baroque Orchestra and a fine line-up of singers present a pasticcio setting of a libretto by Metastasio, with contributions from composers including Caldara, Vivaldi, Galuppi, Hasse and Paisiello. In the eighteenth century, 1,300 years after the last Olympic Games in ancient times, the Olympic theme was highly fashionable. Many composers based operas on the libretto L'Olimpiade by Metastasio. This recording has been structured to contain all of Metastasio’s original arias; it is a pasticcio in the sense that the music is by 16 different composers amongst the many that set the libretto between 1733 and the end of the century.

The versatile Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado, whose international profile has been rising in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years, seems to tackle all genres with alacrity, but Baroque period-instrument performance is his main calling card. He's a great choice, then, for the re-launch of Deutsche Grammophon’s Archiv Produktion imprint, with this disc of orchestral music associated with Farinelli’s long tenure at the Spanish court -much of it dug out of archives and recorded for the first time.

The contents of this album reflect the operatic music Mozart would have known as a teenager. One of the composers, Christoph Willibald Gluck, is known as a founder of the Classical style in opera; others, including Johann Adolf Hasse, Johann Christian Bach, and Tommaso Traetta, are known mostly to specialists, at least in the operatic field. Listeners who have heard the spectacular arias of the late Baroque popularized by Renée Fleming and others will find the pieces here less virtuosic but more dramatically satisfying, as if the composers and librettists had engaged themselves anew with the ancient Greek stories they were retelling. One might object that annotator Denis Morrier gives short shift to the most important of the librettists, Pietro Metastasio, whose writings remained popular up to Beethoven's time.

In November 1772, as the 16-year-old Mozart was preparing to astonish the Milanese with his third operatic work for the Teatro Regio Ducal, his older contemporary, Tommaso Traetta (1727–79) from the Puglia region of Italy, was presenting the premiere of his second opera for the court of Catherine the Great in St Petersburg. Today, the former’s Lucio Silla is probably better known than the latter’s Antigona. But which is the finer work? On the basis of this outstanding new recorded version, I would say that Traetta’s tragedia per musica in three acts far outclasses Mozart’s opera seria for its consistent musical inspiration and sheer theatrical know-how.

This is the first project in a seven-volume series exploring the ‘Sturm und Drang’ movement, which swept through all art forms in the between the early 1760s and 1780s. The purpose of this movement were to frighten and perturb through the use of wild and subjective emotional means of expression.

Mozart+ is an exceptional selection of some of the most beautiful concert and opera arias by W.A. Mozart as well as discoveries of largely unknown arias from operas by Tommaso Traetta, Giovanni Paisiello and Vicente Martín y Soler, reflecting the exchange of musical ideas between Mozart and his contemporaries and getting these three composers out of Mozart's shadow.

Tommaso Traetta (1727 - 1779) wrote approximately forty operas in the serious and comic veins though his adaptations of the lyric tragedies were most significant. Traetta studied with Nicola Porpora and Francesco Durante and was influenced by Rameau, Rousseau, Metastasio, Jommelli and Gluck as well as several librettists concurrent at the time. He served as the director of the Ospedaletto in Venice and later became the master of music at the Russian court in St. Petersburg. Before returning to Venice he also spent some time in London. Among his operas were "Ippolito ed Aricia," "Ifigenia in Tauride," "Antigone," "Sonfonisba," and "Armida." Critically Traetta's operas were often scored for too many principle characters. Most of the operas, if not all, were based on classical literature and scored for larger orchestras than had heretofore been conventional. The operas which Traetta composed were both serious and comic.