“For me, it’s the utmost to play and work on the music of Bach!” Violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann is one of the greatest artists of his generation. Accompanied by Enrico Pace, his pianist counterpart since 1998, he plays the unrivalled violin sonatas…

The Merry Widow (Die Lustige Witwe) had its premiere at Vienna's Theater an der Wien in 1905. The operetta, which tells the story of a wealthy widow in search of a new husband was a major success for its composer Franz Lehár (1870-1948) and quickly…

Gidon Kremer is one of the most headstrong and original artists in the music business and has been hailed once by Herbert von Karajan as the world’s best violinist. His return to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partitas was a major event. Kremer’s first…

A dim light picks out the outlines of the hall. Suddenly a massive shadow appears and moves swiftly over to the keyboard. There follows the vaguest of unsmiling acknowledgements in the general direction of the audience, and then the music begins…

With its recordings of Mozart’s string quartets Nos. 14 to 19, the Hagen Quartet exhibits some of the composer’s most refined compositional thinking and a remarkably wide range of emotions. These quartets were composed in the early 1780s and served…

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…