Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Caccini | English

A rare chance to see the first extant opera written by a woman, Francesca Caccini's La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’ isola d’ Alcina. 

Acrobats flying to the music of Vivaldi and his contemporaries makes for a surprising but highly entertaining combination in this energetic pastiche.

Thanks to the dedicated work of scholars and practitioners in the field, in the last decade, audiences in London have become relatively familiar with the music of female composers in the Baroque period.

Francesca Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola di Alcina, performed at the Medici court in Florence in 1625, is said to be the first opera composed by a female composer.

Entitled “Monteverdi, Opera and Beyond”, lyric tenor and baroque specialist Paul Agnew devised a 90 minute programme exploring the role of recitative in Monteverdi’s opera and its influence on seventeenth-century English and French operatic music.