Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre return to Handel with a complete recording of his opera Alcina.The title role is interpreted by Magdalena Kožená, who reunites with Les Musiciens and maestro Minkowski after a series of acclaimed baroque recordings.She is joined by an excellent cast of soloists, consisting of Erin Morley (Morgana), Anna Bonitatibus (Ruggiero), Elizabeth De Shong (Bradamante), Alois Mühlbacher (Oberto), Valerio Contaldo (Oronte) and Alex Rosen (Melisso).This studio recording transports the listener to Alcina’s enchanted island, and shows Handel at the peak of his power: the score is dramatic, lush and colourful as well as introspective and profound where the story requires it.

…the organ solo is played outstandingly well by Aline Zylberajch… Minkowski is no stranger to Handel and his recordings of the composer's operas Amadigi and Teseo have been warmly acclaimed. So it is not surprising to find plenty to enjoy in his interpretations of the Op. 3 concertos. The playing is spirited, and the obbligato contributions often dazzling; and there are some novel ideas, too, which I found effective. In the third concerto of the set, for instance, Minkowski uses a descant recorder in the outer movements, where flute or treble recorder are generally favoured…

Marin Marais (1656-1728)est ajourd'hui célèbre grâce au fabuleux corpus de pièces pour violes de gambe qu'il nous a laissé et qui ont été remises à l'honneur avec le célèbre film "Tous les matins du monde" et les disques de Jordi Savall Mais Marais a aussi écrit 4 opéras dont Alcione, le meilleur d'entre eux.
Avant son enregistrement, celui-ci avait la réputation d'être digne des chefs-d'oeuvre de Lully et annonciateur des splendeurs ramistes, mais pour certains figé dans les règles passéistes du grand style français et refusant malencontreusement les harmonies italianisantes chères à Campra et Charpentier.

Offenbachs La Périchole (1868) will never cease to delight music lovers of all persuasions. Marc Minkowski long one of the composers prophets was keen to pay tribute to him with this world premiere recording on period instruments, in the company of the young school of French singers, including the bewitching Aude Extrémo, the dashing Stanislas de Barbeyrac and the hilarious Alexandre Duhamel. Combining fashionable rhythms with the most unexpected touches of folklore, the score is a veritable flood of hit numbers. How can one not be swept away by the insolence of the Seguidilla, the frenzy of the Bolero or the furious rhythm of the Prison Trio? Never before, perhaps, had Offenbach gone so far in caricaturing political leaders nor used drunkenness to resolve the imbroglio of inextricable sentimental relationships. And indeed, the Tipsy Arietta is one of the composer's best-known numbers. Cheers!

There are two different short operas (from 1754 and 1757) by Rameau with the title Anacréon. Both are one-act actes de ballet; this one was actually used as the third entrée of Rameau's opéra-ballet Les surprises de l'Amour when it was revived the same year. Both works have as their subject the Greek poet, Anacreon. The 1757 one - which was first performed at the Paris Opéra in May of that year and has a libretto by Pierre-Joseph Justin Bernard - has an only marginally less slight ‘plot’ than the earlier Anacréon. It follows an argument as to the relative merits of love and wine. That’s resolved in Anacreon’s favour by L’Amour; in fact, he believes the two are not incompatible.

Handels operas are now so thoroughly a part of modern musical life that you might think every major opera house welcomes them. But until November 2010, when it introduced an absorbing new production of Alcina, the Vienna Staatsoper resisted them, not having done a Baroque opera since Monteverdis Poppea in the 1960s. The present production boasted an all-star cast of Baroque specialists, a former director of the Royal Shakespeare Company Adrian Noble, the highly-acclaimed conductor Marc Minkowski and his Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble in the pit. Adrian Noble places his Alcina into a framework which begins in the magnificent ballroom of the Devonshire-House in London Piccadilly. The legendary Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, stages a play in which she is acting together with her friends, a stage on the stage. Alcina is a great musical experience geared to the Baroque curiosity. Marc Minkowski revives Handels music in an outstanding way.

This is an untouchably great performance of one of Handel's most interesting oratorios: its examination of jealousy is on a par with what can be found in Otello and Pelléas. There's drama galore–in fact, during its first run it was referred to as a "musical drama" (rather than an oratorio), and Handel and his librettist, Thomas Broughton, always referred to its "acts" rather than "parts", as sections of oratorios were commonly known.

This is Handel's very first oratorio, to a libretto by Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili and with a title that translates as "The Triumph of Time and Disillusionment" (HWV 46a). The work, comprising two sections, was composed in spring 1707 and premiered that summer in Rome. Its most famous aria is "Lascia la spina", later recast as "Lascia ch'io pianga" in his 1711 opera Rinaldo.

Amadigi di Gaula (HWV 11) is a "magic" opera in three acts, with music by George Frideric Handel. It was the fifth Italian opera that Handel wrote for London and was composed during his stay at Burlington House in 1715. It is based on Amadis de Grèce, a French tragédie-lyrique by André Cardinal Destouches and Antoine Houdar de la Motte. Charles Burney maintained near the end of the eighteenth century, Amadigi contained "…more invention, variety and good composition, than in any one of the musical dramas of Handel which I have yet carefully and critically examined.” The opera received its first performance in London at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket on 25 May 1715. Handel made prominent use of wind instruments, so the score is unusually colorful, and at points resembles the Water Music, which he composed only a few years later.

Teseo (HWV 9) is an opera seria with music by George Frideric Handel, the only Handel opera that is in five acts. The Italian-language libretto was by Nicola Francesco Haym, after Philippe Quinault's Thésée. It was Handel's third London opera, intended to follow the success of Rinaldo after the unpopular Il pastor fido. First performed on 10 January 1713,Teseo featured "magical" effects such as flying dragons, transformation scenes and apparitions and had a cast of notable Italian opera singers. It was a success with London audiences, receiving thirteen performances even though the stage machinery for the "magical" effects broke down, and would have received more performances had not one of the theatre's managers run away with the box office receipts.

Staged and costumed by Laurent Pelly, with sets by Chantal Thomas and choreography by Laura Scozzi, this production of La Belle Hélène never forgets for one moment that Offenbach’s parody of the origins of the Trojan war -clearly recognisable in his day as a satire on the moral laxity of Second Empire high society- is, above all, a supreme manifestion of his comic genius. From start to finish it combines a musically superb performance with a stream of visual humour that flows from Pelly’s core idea that the action all takes place in the imagination of a sleeping, sex-starved, suburban housewife. Dame Felicity Lott is magnificent as the woman who gets into bed beside her somnolent old husband and dreams of being the most beautiful woman in the world, entangled in amorous adventures with the virile young Paris, tastily portrayed by Yann Beuron. And just as dreams do not respect the normal limitations of logic, time and place, so her nighttime fantasies combine the everyday with the mythical, and muddle up Greece, ancient and modern.

Dame Felicity Lott stars in a rollicking performance of Offenbach's operetta "La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein." The stage production was filmed in December 2004 at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. The result is a kaleidoscope of artistry and comedy that should not be missed! This production goes back to the original version which had been adjusted and censored after it's premiere at the Theatre des Varietes in 1867.

Like many renditions of Bach's monumental B Minor Mass, this one puts forward a musical argument: in this case, for the use of a vocal ensemble made up of ten soloists rather than a choir. Minkowski's approach may be historically aggressive, but the sound is unstintingly lovely and the pared-down arrangements shed an interesting and unusual light on this most familiar of the baroque masterworks. Highly recommended to most classical collections and all period-instrument collections.

It’s an achievement when an artist can take a well-known work and interpret it freshly as if heard for the first time. This Marc Minkowski does with Handel’s Water Music by daring to challenge convention and expectation. Firstly Minkowski chooses to ignore modern musicology, which considers the work a continuous piece or a sequence of movements first in F major or D minor, then a mix of movements in D major and G major. Minkowski follows the earlier performance practice of presenting the Water Music as three suites, respectively grounded in F, G and D major which used to be called the Horn, Flute and Trumpet suites, designating the notable solo instruments. Minkowski also includes the two variant movements in F, HWV331, which are now thought to be a revision by Handel to create a freestanding concerto.

Les amours de Ragonde (The Loves of Ragonde, original title: Le mariage de Ragonde et de Colin ou La Veillée de Village) is an opera in three acts by Jean-Joseph Mouret with a libretto by Philippe Néricault Destouches. It was first performed at the Château de Sceaux in December, 1714. It is one of the first French comic operas.