Australia's most exciting opera company, Pinchgut Opera has attracted rave reviews since making its debut with Handel's Semele in 2002. ABC Classics has been with Pinchgut all the way, releasing all five of their previous productions on CD to critical acclaim; the magic continues with Pinchgut's performance of Vivaldi's Juditha Triumphans. Enter a world of musical ecstasy with the exquisite voices of Pinchgut and the subtle beauty of rare Baroque instruments in Vivaldi's gripping tale of virtue, passion and revenge.

While Pergolesi’s vivacious intermezzo of 1733 – a crucial staging post in the development of opera buffa – has a toehold in the repertoire, Paisiello’s 1781 setting of the same silly libretto for Catherine the Great is virtually unknown. The more sophisticated Paisiello can’t match Pergolesi for verve and unassuming lightness of touch. His fast arias tend to be more emphatic, less melodically catchy. But there is plenty to admire in the polished craftsmanship, the colourful writing for woodwind (including prominent clarinets) and, in two of Serpina’s arias, a vein of soulful lyricism characteristic of the Age of Sentiment.

The novelties here are the Mattheson works, the first two fully composed, the third a figured-bass exercise from Mattheson's treatise on the subject. The sonata is a dramatic, virtuoso outing in the Italian style; the suite, ostensibly more french in character, retains a typical German heaviness.

Johann Georg Reutter (1708-1772) worked in Vienna as a court composer and gained a reputation early on as a skilled creator of oratorios and works of music drama. With this CD the mezzo-soprano Olivia Vermeulen and the Ensemble Nuovo Aspetto present a fascinating preview of this talented composer.

The Italian Steffani spent most of his fabulous career as a composer, spy, and diplomat in Germany, in München and Hanover, with a prolonged visit to Paris to the court of Louis XIV. In terms of the prevalent national styles of music in the late 17th C, Steffani was "all over the place" – his overtures are thoroughly French, his arias sparklingly Italian, and his mastery of counterpoint profoundly German. Does that stylistic Duke's Mixture ring any bells? A certain pair of Germans born in 1685, one revered for his cantatas and the other for his operas, were both indebted to Steffani for his synthesis of Italian, French, and German fashions.

In campo operistico, il periodo storico tra Cavalli e Handel - quello, per capirci, che comprende giganti come Stradella, A. Scarlatti, Legrenzi… - è il più trascurato dalla discografia. Ed è un peccato, perché è il periodo nel quale si sviluppano le forme e gli stili che saranno tipici del Barocco maturo, come l'aria con il da-capo ed il virtuosismo belcantistico. Benvenuta quindi questa produzione dell'austriaca ORF, che documenta dal vivo l'esecuzione di questo rarissimo "Giulio Cesare in Egitto" del veneziano Antonio Sartorio, uno dei maggiori eredi di Cavalli nel florido operismo lagunare.