Chamber Music & Recitals

A pioneer in the development of opera, Claudio Monteverdi took vocal music beyond Renaissance polyphony into an era in which genuine feelings and emotions could be expressed. Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria is part of a late flowering in Monteverdi's...

Linda di Chamounix is a pretty country girl who is in love with Carlo, who she believes is a penniless artist. Her honor is threatened by the local squire and she escapes to Paris in search of fortune. This is a tale of courage and madness, in which we...

Mozart wrote La finta giardiniera in 1775 when he was 18 years old. It was his first staged buffo opera and centres on the lovers at the heart of the action, Sandrina - the pretend garden-girl of the title - and Belfiore. With few ensembles, Mozart...

An overpowering and paradoxical perfume of dream and reality floats around 'La Traviata', as if the life and death of this so-called "errant" woman seem more real and more elusive than those of other opera heroines. It is with this perfume, composed of...

Death is never far away in Leo? Jan?cek's work: in The Cunning Little Vixen, the main character falls under the fire of a hunter, Katia Kabanova kills herself, Emilia Marty in The Makropulos Case has to deal with the hard consequences of eternal youth...

After the great success that Il Trovatore received in Paris, Verdi was proposed to compose a French version of the opera to suit the tastes of the local public. The original work, based on the Spanish play El trovador by Antonio Garc?a Guti?rrez, had a...

Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys, a trag?die en musique, became known as the 'king's opera' due to Louis XIV's fondness for it. The work stands as a testament to the Sun King's courtly refinement, as well as his moves to make France the center of European...

Charles Gounod was enchanted by the young Proven?al-born Fr?d?ric Mistral's epic love poem Mir?io, and enlisted the distinguished Michel Carr? to fashion a libretto. Against the grain of prevailing operatic practice in the 1860s, and it's promotion of...

A profound, powerful and yet unfinished opera, Moses und Aron ends with an admission of defeat: "O word, thou Word that I lack!", Moses' last cry, is also the last phrase the composer has been able to set to music. Recounting the story of Moses, who has...

Nicola Vaccaj belonged to the Neapolitan school: a pupil of Paisiello and contemporary of Rossini, whose fame somehow obscured his own, he was well known and appreciated at his time, to the point that an extract from the last Act of his Giulietta e Romeo...

Autumn 1918. A group of soldiers returns from the trenches. The world-weary Benedick and his friend Claudio find themselves reacquainted with Beatrice and Hero. As memories of conflict give way to a life of parties and masked balls, Claudio and Hero fall...

Shakespeare: Henry V Blu-Ray