Composed when he was just twenty-four, Agrippina was Handel’s first theatrical success and is a sparkling example of his early work. It is full of his fresh, exuberantly inventive music and employs one of the finest librettos with which George…

In Spring 2019, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, led by John Eliot Gardiner, presented a critically-acclaimed European tour of Handel’s opera 'Semele', including Alexandra Palace Theatre in London, where this live recording took…

Requiring 38 soloists, chorus and large orchestra, Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina is a challenging opera to stage. In Munich, the city in which it was given its world premiere in 1917, director Christian Stückl and the Bavarian State Opera met those…

Regarded as one of the world’s greatest living composers, Hans Werner Henze (born 1926) is ’particularly well known for his works for the stage. He composed one of his great successes, the comic opera Der junge Lord (The Young Lord) to a libretto by…

In the Summer of 2009, the British director Nigel Lowery and the Iranian choreographer Amir Hosseinpour brought to the stage of the Berlin State Opera “Unter den Linden”, with colour and full of humour, the fantastic and imaginative adventures of…

The Danish National Symphony Orchestra rolls out the red carpet for a sparkling Hollywood Gala with a musical firework display from the best Hollywood films such as Bodyguard, Titanic, Pirates of the Caribbean, Moulin Rouge, and The Hunger Games…

First staged at the Weimar Court Theatre under the baton of Richard Strauss in 1893, who hailed it as “a masterpiece of the highest quality”, Humperdinck's debut opera Hänsel und Gretel has remained a solid favourite since its 1893 première…

Rossini was 24 years old when he wrote his seventeenth opera and most renowned "buffa", The Barber of Seville, in barely three weeks. This recording is from the 1988 Schwetzinger Festspiele. The production by Michael Hampe is distinguished by a…

Iolanta and Perséphone - A double bill consisting of two stage works that “represent an ideal of beauty, poetry and hope” forms this production in Madrid from the Teatro Real. In both works the progression from darkness to light acts as an initiation…

Sir Simon Rattle conducts the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra & State Opera Choir The French Baroque opera Hippolyte et Aricie carries its audience away into a world of wonder with magnificent dance and choir scenes and an astonishing variety of musical…