La Nuova Musica and its artistic director David Bates present Henry Purcell's most widely admired work Dido and Aeneas. With Nathum Tate's libretto based on Virgil's Aeneid Book IV, Dido and Aeneas is a miniature opera, as well as the only all-sung opera Purcell ever composed.

Two of the brightest singing talents to have emerged from Italy in recent years, Giulia Semenzato and Raffaele Pe, join forces for Sospiri d’amore, a dazzling celebration of operatic arias and duets by that Baroque master of amorous emotions, Francesco Cavalli. Soprano and countertenor are supported by a modern master of Italian Baroque style in Claudio Cavina, who directs La Venexiana (Cavina has also led the Glossa recording of Cavalli’s 1656 opera Artemisia).

Giulia Semenzato, already renowned for her interpretations of the Baroque repertory and her Mozartian roles, presents here her first solo album. The programme, entitled Angelica diabolica, is devoted to the female protagonists of Ludovico Ariosto, author of the epic poem Orlando furioso, whose emblematic figure is Angelica, a revolutionary heroine, ready to resort to any trick in order to regain her freedom. After the Baroque Rome of Luigi Rossi and his opera Il palazzo incantato (1642), we turn to the galant style of Naples with Nicola Porpora’s serenata Angelica (1720), then to Milan in 1702 with the warlike heroine of Bernardo Sabadini’s opera Angelica nel Catai, before a more melancholy take on the character by Agostino Steffani (1691).

For the problem of ‘genuine’ and ‘spurious’ works by Pergolesi has preoccupied musicologists for centuries. Of the approximately one hundred and fifty works that circulate under his name, he probably composed only thirty or so. Most of them were attributed to him posthumously, since publishers such as Bremner hoped to drum up better business thereby.