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In the intimate splendour of the Margravial Opera House, Bayreuth Baroque revives Cavalli’s Pompeo Magno with a riot of colors, eight masked countertenors and a Tiepolo-like air of playful chaos.

A luminous evening in Hamburg's Laeiszhalle, where Hana Blažíková and Bruce Dickey revive the voice-like soul of the cornetto in a concert of breath, beauty and Baroque eloquence.

Touring with the ensemble Il Pomo d'Oro, Jakub Józef Orliński reinvents the Baroque recital formula at the Berlin Philharmonic featuring breakdancing, an audience sing-along and a good deal of fun.

Leo Muscato directs an operatic rarity at the Festival Valle d'Itria, with Federico Maria Sardelli leading Orchestra Barocca Modo Antiquo.

Pageantry abounds as the popular mezzo-soprano turns the Konzerthaus Wien into a sort of classical music, multisensory varieté.

Cavalli's debut at La Scala is a triumph, earning applause that not even a Bohème or a Traviata can sometimes elicit. 

Love comes in 57 varieties in Cavalli's Apollo and Dafne, and they're both enjoyed and suffered by a dynamic cast of six playing 20 characters.

Voices, orchestra staging: everything in this Ercole Amante is light and magic, to the great delight of the Salle Favart audience.

Strozzi's music is vivid and spectacular: period specialists Flores and Leonardo García Alarcón make a strong case for it, with an emotional slice of Argentina for an encore.

A performance of Handel's short masterpiece Apollo e Dafne at the Halle Handel Festival was somewhat disappointing but Fulvio Bettini impressed in the bass role.

Anna Prohaska reigns supreme in programme of Cleopatra and Dido-inspired Baroque arias in her late night Prom.

A flamboyant production and a wonderful cast of singers seals a big success for this gem of the early Baroque.

A young, vibrant cast brings to life a rarely performed Baroque opera, in the production from the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence.

Cappella Mediterranea blows life into Eliogabalo’s dark carnival as imagined by Thomas Jolly.

Don't attempt to plough through the synopsis, but enjoy Cavalli's sexy score, persuasively performed in Jean Bellorini's modern staging. 

Considering how rarely celebrated diva Cecilia Bartoli appears in London, Wigmore Hall certainly pulled off a coup by making her duo concert with Philippe Jaroussky happen.

The advantage of staging a rare opera such as Cavalli's Hipermestra at Glyndebourne this year is that the director can work with a blank canvas without audience’s preconceptions.

Despite the beautiful sensitivity of La Nuova Musica, coupled with some truly sublime singing, the silliness of Cavalli’s opera is sometimes overplayed in this semi-staged production; less is, sometimes, more.

Clever staging and a high standard of acting does much to happily while away the three hours of this baroque opera in the second of ETO's Baroque extravaganza.

Themed around legendary African queens Dido and Cleopatra, Prohaska’s recital with the virtuosi of Il Giardino Armonico could serve as a template for the ideal Baroque programme.

Ensemble Correspondances give a virtuoso display of polychoral music from Marc-Antoine Charpentier and his Italian contemporaries.

Every early music festival these days needs one or more star countertenors in their programme. At this year’s Müpa Budapest’s Régizene Fesztival, Valer Barna-Sabadus was featured together with homegrown soprano Emöke Bárath.

Rare Baroque Mass performed in Malta

At carnival time, Cavalli’s mission was to make his audience laugh, wow them with a bit of vocal gymnastics, butter up their romantic feelings with a few delicate cadences, and maybe leave a tear or two in their eye. It’s a potent formula, and it still works.

Jordi Savall directs a multi-lingual, multi-cultural voyage through Europe's war-torn past.

La Calisto is a delicious mash-up of two classical legends: Jupiter’s seduction of Diana’s acolyte Calisto and Diana’s own romance with the shepherd Endymion. The plot is helter-skelter, Anne Ridler’s translation of Giovanni Faustini’s libretto is sassy and fun. I can’t imagine being more entertained by an evening’s chamber opera.

There is something pleasurably straining, for the big-hall, velvet-accustomed operagoer, about the experience of sitting for three hours on a very tiny bench in a charmingly chiselled, candlelit little theatre that invites contemplation in its own right – beyond the attractions, musical and other, set up within its frame.

Francesco Cavalli's Egisto is a true feast for the senses in director Benjamin Lazar's conception, realised with conductor Vincent Dumestre at the Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg.

Giasone was the most performed opera of the 17th century, but this was no dry, reverent exhumation. This was something much better from Pinchgut Opera: a joyous, animated resurrection.

“... and as Venice in many things surpasses all places else where I have been, so are these Operas the most excellent of all its glorious Vanities.” So wrote the entranced English traveller Richard Bargrave in 1655. These days, however, Venice travels to England in the form of the English Touring Opera’s 2013 autumn season production.

Describing its new production of Francesco Cavalli’s 1668 opera Eliogabalo, the Gotham Chamber Opera compares the exploits of titular depraved Roman emperor Heliogabalus to Salome. There’s an obvious mistake here: Salome is an opera; Heliogabalus was a historical figure.

If Vienna is the holy temple of classical music (Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Strauss, Bruckner and Mahler all spent large tracts of their careers here), then the Musikverein is its holy of holies. Just soaking in all that history makes a visit here into a special occasion, and the heavily gilt halls are as opulent and redolent of empire as you might imagine.

La mise en scène de Jetske Mijnssen déçoit, au contraire de la réalisation musicale proposée par une belle distribution réunie sous la direction intelligente de Sébastien Daucé.

À la tête d'une production qui mobilisait les étudiants en musique ancienne et en art lyrique de la Haute École de Musique de Genève, le chef helvético-argentin a présenté une œuvre alambiquée du compositeur vénitien.

Ein von zunächst steigerungsfähigem zu gesteigertem Zeremoniell, das vor allem mit „Mariage“ und „Réjouissances“ sowie der Philharmonie-Orgel und den spanischen Elementen Frankreichs damaliger Zukunft eine unterhaltsame Dumestre-Rekonstruktion heutiger Raritäten war.

Splendide musique dans le Dafne d'Antonio Caldara; les trois magiciennes baroques Médée, Armide et Circé interprétées par la mezzo-soprano française.

Calixto Bieito deutet das Werk im Geist der heutigen Gender-Debatte. Und Dmitry Sinkovsky legt eine packende musikalische Interpretation der vor 20 Jahren ausgegrabenen Barockoper hin.

Joyce DiDonato tient littéralement le Théâtre des Champs-Élysées sous son charme au cours d'un spectacle dédié à la Nature, parvenant à rendre cohérent un programme à la disparité assumée.

Ein königlicher FEL!X-Auftakt, der das Herz Liebhaber historischer Instrumente höher schlagen ließ.

Orchester und Chor machen Daucés schlafwandlerisch rekonstruiertes Spektakel zu einem wahrgewordenen Traum oder solchem, der in Erinnerung bleibt.

Alles andere als trockene Barockoper: Wolfgang Katschner und Jens-Daniel Herzog machen mitreißende Mythologie aus Ovids Metamorphosen.

Depravación, lujuria y extravagancia se imponen en el Teatro Real de la mano de David Alden para mostrarnos la hermosa música de Cavalli.

Malgré son évident intérêt musical, La Calisto a jusqu’ici attiré l’attention des metteurs en scène avant tout pour les jeux sur les registres et le(s) genre(s) que le livret de Giovanni Faustini, basé sur les Métamorphoses, laissait entrevoir.

Une bien belle découverte avec ce « Giasone » de Cavalli sous la baguette de Leonardo Garcia Alarcon : un casting dominé par les voix de la Medea de Kristina Hammarström  et l’Isifile de Fristina Mkhitaryan, porté par la mise en scène piquante de Serena Sinigaglia, et mis en valeur par les fastes de la Capella Mediterranea. 

Création posthume de Francesco Cavalli Eliogabalo retrace le court règne de cet empereur romain dépravé et pervers dans une mise en scène carnavalesque et explicite.

Das Orchestre du Concert d'Astrée unter Leitung von Emmanuelle Haïm präsentiert ein fast in Vergessenheit geratenes Meisterwerk von Francesco Cavalli.