Il matrimonio segreto is the only opera that has ever had the honor of being repeated in full at its premiere, so very much did the comical musical goings-on please its distinguished audience. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Innsbruck Early Music Festival Weeks, the conductor Alessandro De Marchi again at long last led a performance of Cimarosa’s most popular opera in historical performance practice and in original sound.

The fourth volume of the Haydn2032 project thrusts into the limelight one of the most important stock characters in the theatre of sounds and words, the Kapellmeister, and explores some glamorous and (in)glorious moments in the career of Maestro Haydn. It features three symphonies by the "Shakespeare of Music" - one of which is even associated with ana ctual play. This bears teh title "Sinfonia in C per la commedia intitolata il distratto" and consists of an overture, four entra'actes, and a finale to be played at the end of the performance. Also on this release is a large-scale buffo scene by his colleague Cimarosa. Il maestro di cappella is a witty and ironic parody, in which a member of the "old school" of musicians tries to improve the ensemble playing of his orchestra. To his chagrin, the players do react, but in extremely undisciplined fashion: they are distracted, make false entries and disagree musically…

Es sind vor allem der Dirigent Domenico Sanfilippo und das außerordentlich stilsicher spielende Kammerorchester der Pra- ger Oper, die Cimarosa immer einfallsreiche, geistvolle Musik so himmlisch frisch und un- verbraucht erklingen lassen.

Raymond Leppard, CBE (born 11 August 1927, London, England - died 22 October 2019, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA) was an English-American conductor, harpsichordist, composer & editor. In the 1960s, he played a prime role in the rebirth of interest in Baroque music. he was appointed Music Director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1987 (a position which he held for fourteen years).

The Venice Baroque Orchestra and a fine line-up of singers present a pasticcio setting of a libretto by Metastasio, with contributions from composers including Caldara, Vivaldi, Galuppi, Hasse and Paisiello. In the eighteenth century, 1,300 years after the last Olympic Games in ancient times, the Olympic theme was highly fashionable. Many composers based operas on the libretto L'Olimpiade by Metastasio. This recording has been structured to contain all of Metastasio’s original arias; it is a pasticcio in the sense that the music is by 16 different composers amongst the many that set the libretto between 1733 and the end of the century.

The artistry of Holliger (b1939) prompted Evelyn Rothwell (Lady Barbirolli) to call him 'The Paganini of the oboe' Holliger's mastery of the oboe ranges over a vast expanse of repertoire, from the baroque to contemporary – Bach to Berio and Zelenka to Zimmermann. His style is notable for its flexibility, agility, integrity and ability to communicate convincingly across the wide range of repertoire he performs. Holliger has done much to champion the oboe music of composers such as Zelenka and Krommer, and has also had over 100 works composed for him by composers including Berio, Carter, Henze, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Penderecki and Stockhausen.

For the later part of her career, Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli has apparently settled on a campaign of major conceptual releases covering all-but-unknown repertory, and St. Petersburg fits right in. It's a collection of arias from operas written in the second half of the 18th century for the Russian imperial court, which had imported the best Italian and German composers money could buy. The names of all but Mozart's contemporary Domenico Cimarosa are unknown today. Most of the arias are in Italian, but a couple are in Russian, and to untutored ears Bartoli brings her trademark passion to them. This is the kind of release where one can quibble with any number of details. Bartoli sounds thick in some places, strained in others. The material is a bit uneven, with especially the last two pieces creating a bit of a letdown, although much of it does indeed live up to major-forgotten-works billing.

Il matrimonio segreto is Cimarosa's most famous opera buffa and it is one of the few comic operas to have maintained its place in the repertoire until today. At its first performance in 1792, Austrian emperor Leopold II is reputed to have liked this masterpiece so much that he ordered the musicians to play it again from the beginning!

Venezuelan sopranista Samuel Mariño presents his debut album Sopranista, showcasing his unique, delicate voice. Featuring beautiful Mozart & Gluck aria favourites written for castrati of the 18th century, many heard here recorded by a man for the first time along with world premieres and rarities by Cimarosa and Bologne, Chevalier de St-Georges.

For his latest album, Ólafsson presents some of his favourite Mozart keyboard works in the company of pieces by a selection of the composer’s leading contemporaries. Juxtaposing works by Mozart, Haydn and C.P.E. Bach with rarely-recorded Galuppi and Cimarosa, Mozart & Contemporaries dispels the image of Mozart as the angelic and prodigious idiot savant, instead presenting a mature composer through music primarily dating from the 1780s: a resourceful, hard-working adult who had come to know adversity. All is artfully brought together by Ólafsson’s signature thought-provoking programming.

Cimarosa’s opera, which reuses some items from the composer’s Il matrimonio in ballo of 1776, exists in two versions. The first – the holograph manuscript of which is preserved in the Conservatorio di Musica SW. Pietro a Majella, in Naples – was entitled Il credulo and consists of two acts – although the second contains only one scene and a chorus. The second version is in one act and is entitled Il credulo deluso. The manuscript of this version is in London, British Library Add MS. 16001. The one-act version omits a few items, particularly some in Neapolitan dialect.

Le astuzie femminili (Feminine wiles) is an dramma giocoso in four acts by Domenico Cimarosa with an Italian libretto by Giuseppe Palomba (it). The opera buffa premiered at the Teatro dei Fiorentini in Naples, Italy, on 26 August 1794. The opera was subsequently performed in Barcelona in 1795, Lisbon in 1797, Vienna in 1799, Paris in 1802, and London in 1804, remaining popular during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Although not performed often today, the opera is still occasionally revived and a number of recordings have been made.

Cimarosa was an expert at writing lighthearted opera buffa that zipped along. Much of this music sounds very much like his better known IL Matrimonio Segreto, coming clearly out of the same stable, but it has its distinctive elements. Here the forces of the Festival Valle D'Itria come up with a sparkling production. The singing and the orchestra come across as excellent, the conductor Eric Hull keeping things moving with a light touch that keeps it all together. The singers keep the music zipping along, and when it turns more serious, Alla Simonischvili, the lead soprano, and the others handle it well. Well recorded, especially considering that apparently we have some sort of mixture of only two straight-through live performances, and well performed this set offers a good deal of pleasure.

Domenico Cimarosa was the most famous and popular Italian composer of the second half of the eighteenth century. In the course of a brilliantly successful career he composed more than 65 operas, as well as a significant body of instrumental music and works for the church. His operas were performed all over Europe, both in Italian and in translation. A number of Cimarosa’s operas continued to enjoy occasional stagings during the nineteenth century, and his most famous work, Il matrimonio segreto, is one of only a handful of operas of the period never to have left the repertory. Cimarosa’s overtures are remarkable for their melodic invention, assured handling of the orchestra and sheer vitality.

Early in December 1787 Catherine II of Russia invited the famous composer to her court at St Petersburg where Italian opera was all the rage. A few days after his arrival the wife of the ambassador of Naples and Sicily died and Cimarosa was asked by him to compose a Requiem Mass for the funeral. Composers did not need to bother about being original in those days and Cimarosa could draw easily on a common stock of melodic ideas, but, nevertheless, his Mass is well shaped and certainly not a mere puce d'occasion.