Composed for La Scala in Milan in 1819, Bianca e Falliero is an opera of extraordinary dramatic originality, rich in highly spectacular stage solutions, and a fundamental work for our understanding of the full significance of the authentic revolution that the composer from Pesaro brought about in opera; a revolution that was destined to have a decisive influence on the development of Italian opera in the nineteenth century. The singing cast features Maria Bayo, Daniela Barcellona, Francesco Meli and Carlo Lepore, conducted by Renato Palumbo and directed by Jean-Louis Martinoty.

This production of Bellini's famous masterpiece Norma was extraordinary in many aspects. Staged by Italian director and filmmaker Roberto Ando at the Teatro Regio in Parma, it gathered international stars like American soprano June Anderson and shooting star Daniela Barcellona as well as Russian bass lldar Abdrazakov. Audience and critics alike enthusiastically received the remarkable orchestral accompaniment. Fabio Biondi's transparent conducting and the authentic performance practice of Europa Galante illuminated the musical structure of Bellini's opera and provided a new perspective on early 19th century opera.

Semiramide, based on a play by Voltaire about an ancient Assyrian queen, was Rossini's last Italian opera. Some five hours long in performance, it has always been subject to cuts from producers worried that it was a butt-breaker, but Rossini insisted that it be performed as written. He was right: its massive two acts have a logic and flow that do not flag. Despite its size and difficulty (check the hefty list of sponsors and patrons in the booklet), the opera is being revived increasingly often. The work has been called the last Baroque opera, with its tragic plot from antiquity encrusted with glittering, highly ornamented arias, and you might suppose that a performance stands or falls with the singers. This version certainly offers strong ones, including the superb pair of sopranos Albina Shagimuratova in the title role and Daniela Barcellona in the travesti or cross-dressing role of the commander Arsace.

This DVD documents a production of the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, which over the last 25 years has developed into one of the most important institutions of Italian musical life. This wonderful 1999 "Tancredi" production was on the repertoire there before traveling to Rome and finally to Florence, where it was recorded in 2005. Her concentrated classical pictures are characterized by an almost overwhelming architectural look with columns, reliefs and an altar. Director Pier Luigi Pizzi plays with a black and white contrast, which symbolizes the parties of Syracuse and which he added the color red - a symbol of the retreating hero.

Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835) Bellini, unlike many of his colleagues - among them Donizetti - did not have to endure the disappointments and difficulties ofrising from the ranks. His Bianca e Gernando, in 1826, was well received at Naples’s Teatro San Carlo, and one year later, atthe age of twenty-six, the composer triumphed at Milan’s La Scala with Il Pirata. Norma is not only the high point of Bellini’sartistic parabola but also the quintessence of Italian belcanto. The present DVD, filmed at the Sferisterio Opera Festival ofMacerata in August 2007, features, in the title role, the famous Greek soprano Dimitra Theodossiou, one of today’s best interpretersof Norma.

In 1778 Antonio Salieri’s Europa riconosciuta became the first work to be performed at the Milanese theatre later known as the Teatro alla Scala. Despite this honour, Europa riconosciuta (Europa recognised) remained unperformed for 226 years until 2004, when Riccardo Muti, then Music Director of La Scala, chose it to reopen the legendary theatre after three years of renovation work. “I love Salieri," Diana Damrau has said. "He was an important man and a musical authority in Vienna, a teacher and an heir to Gluck as a successful opera composer. And, like Mozart, he was a dramatist in music. Europa Riconosciuta is masterly in its construction and builds up step by step.

From its foreboding prelude to its melodramatic conclusion, 'Parisina' is one tuneful delight after ano- ther….Pendatchanska is a youthful protagonist. She has a warm voice of almost mezzo-soprano coloring….Hers is a major vocal talent…

Here are two of Rossini's "secular" cantatas: "The Lament of Harmony on the Death of Orpheus" for tenor, male chorus, and orchestra, written when he was a 16-year-old conservatory student, and the far more substantial "Wedding of Thetis and Peleus," one of many such pieces he composed for special occasions, commissioned for the marriage of an Italian princess to a French prince. Both consist of primarily short, separate, contrasting numbers, most of which would be perfectly at home in the opera house.

„It can be truly said of Adelaide di Borgogna that, like a rose, it bloomed but a day - l’espace d’un matin.” First performed in Rome on the 27th December 1817, it enjoyed very few revivals. In 2011 the Rossini Festival in Pesaro presented the second staged performance of Adelaide di Borgogna since 1825.

The Metropolitan Opera give this live performance of Rossini's work based on the poem by Sir Walter Scott. Michele Mariotti conducts the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus with Joyce DiDonato as Elena, the lady of the lake, who loves the heroic Malcolm (Daniela Barcellona). However, King James V (Juan Diego Flórez) arrives in the Highlands and sets his sights on Elena while her father Douglas (Oren Gradus), who is rebelling against the King's rule, promises his daughter to clan chief Rodrigo (John Osborn).

Early Rossini has something buoyant, vibrant, youthful about it – even when it is a “dramma per musica” such as “Sigismondo”, a dark swirl of an opera revolving around a mad king and his delusions, his wife who is allegedly dead but very much alive, the fate of Poland and much more. Premiered in 1814 but rarely played thereafter, the work deserves to be resurrected, if only for its many beautiful and original arias and ensembles, some of which were such brilliant little masterpieces that he reused them in his later successes such as “Il turco in Italia”, “La Cenerentola” and “Il barbiere di Siviglia”. The work was given its first performance from the critical new edition at the 2010 Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro. The press hailed the production as a “perfect symbiosis of music and stage work” that yields “truly brilliant theater”.

On Friday 3 March, Opera Rara releases Bellini’s first opera Adelson e Salvini, written in 1825 while the composer was still a student at the Naples Conservatory. Marking the company’s third complete opera recording by Bellini, following La straniera and Il Pirata, up and coming bel canto specialist Daniele Rustioni leads the BBC Symphony Orchestra in their fourth collaboration with Opera Rara. Daniela Barcellona sings the role of Nelly and is joined by Enea Scala as Salvini and Simone Alberghini as Lord Adelson.

The bicentenary of this occasion was celebrated with a new production of the same work and Opera Rara went to Trieste to record the initial performances of this important revival. The cast is led by French soprano Elizabeth Vidal who tackles the stratospheric role of Ginevra with ease (and Es – a bushel of them!!). As the hero Ariodante, Daniela Barcellona confirms her place on the roster of talented, young artists emerging from Italy. Antonino Siragusa, likewise, is representative of the new generation of bel canto tenors.

Teatro Regio’s 2013 revival of their highly successful 2006 production of Verdi’s Don Carlo celebrates the 40th anniversary of the theatre’s reopening in 1973. With traditional staging and lavish costume design, the production garnered high acclaim in the national and international press, with GB Opera commending the ‘sumptuous’ setting and French online music magazine ResMusica praising director Hugo de Ana’s decision to revive the show ‘in all its splendour’. Shown here in the four-act version, Don Carlo is the fascinating tale of father-son power struggles, adultery and love that borders on incest. The cast – under the powerful baton of Gianandrea Noseda – is headed by renowned Mexican tenor Ramón Vargas, and also features Ludovic Tézier, who has been hailed as ‘one of the best Verdian singers of our time’ (ResMusica).

Out of Giuseppe Verdi’s adoration for William Shakespeare three masterpieces were born : Macbeth, Otello and, as a musical testament, his only comedy Falstaff. But in accordance with its librettist Arrigo Boito’s wish to remove the original bourgeois farce The Merry Wives of Windsor out of the English mists and to warm it up to the clear Tuscan sun, Falstaff transforms Shakespeare’s morality play into an ode to life, to pleasure and to reconciliation that forgives human vices, rewards intelligence and virtue, and praises that spark of madnessthat gives life its flavour. Shakespeare’s most famous and subversive comic character has indeed proved to be a fertile ground for Verdi who, then eighty-years old, signed with Falstaff his most modern, most ambitious, but also wisest and ambiguous opera.