Inspired by a fable by La Fontaine, Rameau produced perhaps his most brilliant music for his penultimate great work, blending reality and the surreal on several levels. This passionate new production by José Montalvo stunningly choreographed by Montalvo and Dominique Hervieu, sets new standards in entertainment, charm and ingenuity. The sharp and spectacular multimedia staging does full justice to Rameau's dazzling burlesque, confirming Olivier Rouvière's statement that ‘Les Paladins' is the last laugh of a witty 77-year old composer’. Recorded live in 2004 at the Paris Théâtre du Châtelet in true surround sound, both the virtuoso cast and Les Arts Florissants are in top form, clearly enjoying themselves in the masterful hands of William Christie.

There is no complete surviving score for Vivaldi's Ercole su'l Termodonte, but there is enough existing material that modern scholars have been able to reconstruct it primarily by making new settings of the lost recitatives. The first production of the opera since Vivaldi's time was at Spoleto in 2006 in a version by Alessandro Ciccolini, which was released as a DVD. Conductor Fabio Biondi made a version introduced in Venice in 2007, which is recorded on this 2010 Virgin CD. Biondi's recording has the advantage of two international superstars in the leading roles, tenor Rolando Villazón and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, and soprano Diana Damrau is nearly in their league. Villazón's earthy voice is usually associated with 19th century and verismo Italian repertoire, but he has an acute sensitivity to Baroque vocal style, and his robust, almost baritonal tenor is entirely appropriate for a larger-than-life character like Hercules.

English-speaking audiences have always found Die Meistersinger to be a life-enhancing celebration of wisdom, art and song. So it proves in David McVicar's production – the first at Glyndebourne – which is updated to the early-19th century of Wagner's childhood. At the centre of a true ensemble cast is Gerald Finley, a 'gleamingly sung', 'eminently believable' Sachs (The Independent on Sunday), supported by the dynamic conducting of Vladimir Jurowski which, like McVicar's production, uses Glyndebourne's special intimacy to bring sharp focus to bear on the subtlety of Wagner's musical and dramatic counterpoint.

Die Kombination hat sich bewährt. Joseph Haydn hat in Sir John Eliot Gardiner einen Interpreten gefunden, der mit dem nötigen Ernst und der fachlichen Kompetenz seinen geistlichen Werken nachzuspüren vermag. “Seine Darbietungen haben eine bewegende Stärke und Energie. Die Solisten sind ausgezeichnet. An keiner Stelle zweifelt man an Haydns wahrer Größe”, urteilte die BBC über Gardiners Messen-Projekt.

The custom of marking the name-day of Princess Esterházy with a newly composed Mass began in the 1790s and for many years was carried out by Joseph Haydn. In 1807 Beethoven was commissioned and responded with his Mass in C major. Coolly received at court, it is a celebratory work of large-scale brilliance. The cantata Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt is set to Goethe’s poems and contrasts calm with exuberance. In 1803 Beethoven set two numbers from Vestas Feuer, written by Emanuel Schikaneder, the librettist of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.

Vivaldi's first opera, Ottone in Villa (loosely, Ottone's Vacation), is something of an anomaly in the composer's output of largely tragic, heroic works: a pastoral comedy. Written in 1713 when the composer was 35, Ottone demonstrates Vivaldi's instinctive grasp of the operatic form and his gifts for characterization and dramatic development. Naïve continues its admirable series, The Vivaldi Edition, with this outstanding recording of the opera, a real gem. Giovanni Antonini leads Il Giardino Armonico, which plays with gleaming transparency. The performance is wonderfully lively and the opera's dancing energy is conveyed with high spirits and humor. Vivaldi is not a composer usually associated with comedy, so Ottone surprises with its wealth of delightful, sly wit.

As before with the St. Matthew Passion, star director Peter Sellars succeeded in creating a staging which made the spiritual and dramatic content of the Passion story even more intensive. The New York Times also praised the “brilliant and energetic” playing of the orchestra, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung the “haunting, almost unsurpassable singing of all those involved.”

Sir Simon Rattle was in no doubt: the performance of the St. Matthew Passion which he realized together with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Rundfunkchor Berlin in 2010 was for him “the single most important thing we ever did here.” Critics around the world agreed. They praised the semi-staged “ritualization” by American star-director Peter Sellars, as well as the outstanding musical performances by the soloists, including Magdalena Kozená, Christian Gerhaher, Thomas Quasthoff, and Mark Padmore as the Evangelist.

The classy interpretation of Mozart's Così fan tutte concluded Claus Guth's Mozart-Da Ponte opera trilogy at the Salzburg Festival. Hosted in the intimate surroundings of the Haus für Mozart, the comic tale of fi ancée-swapping is fl irtatiously retold by a dynamic cast and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Adam Fischer. Guth's imaginative production maintains the opera's musical drama and humour in a contemporary setting, where young men test their lovers in an entertaining game of seduction and temptation.

Gluck wrote his opera seria Ezio in 1750 for production in Prague. (In 1762, after the formal and stylistic breakthroughs of Orfeo ed Euridice, he revised the opera for a Vienna production, but it's the original version that's recorded here.) The opera has many of the characteristics of Italian late Baroque opera; it's essentially a series of arias separated by accompanied recitatives, the formula that the composer reacted against in Orfeo. It's not Gluck at his most innovative or original, but it's a fine example of opera seria, with a number of impressive arias and some very expressive recitatives, and it can make quite an impact in a performance as fine as this one.

Mozart's genius in setting to music Da Ponte's comic play of love, infidelity and forgiveness marks Così fan tutte as one of the great works of art from the Age of Enlightenment. Nicholas Hytner's beautiful production for the Glyndebourne Festival in 2006, with its sure touch and theatrical know-how, lives up to its promise to be 'shockingly traditional', while Iván Fischer teases artful performances from an outstanding international cast of convincing young lovers.

The scope and grandeur of Handel's operatic output – the musical variety and inventiveness, the depth of psychological insight, as well as the sheer volume of works – continue to astonish as new operas are brought to light and more familiar works are given productions and recordings that do justice to the material. Ariodante, written in 1735, is nowhere nearly as frequently performed as the more famous operas like Giulio Cesare, but neither is it entirely obscure, and there have been several very fine modern recordings. This version with Alan Curtis leading Il Complesso Barocco can be recommended without reservation to anyone coming to the opera for the first time or for anyone who's already a fan.

At the end of April 1791, Wolfgang Amadé Mozart applied for the position of second Kapellmeister at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, hoping to inherit the position from Leopold Hofmann, the incumbent Kapellmeister, the City Council of Vienna accepted Mozart’s petition in a strongly worded decree as a basis for the text in the vocal passages of his Sieben Klangräume accompanying the Unfinished Fragments of Mozart’s Requiem KV 626.

Emmanuelle Haïm has established herself as one of the world’s leading performers, conductors and interpreters of Baroque repertoire, not only with Le Concert d’Astrée, the ensemble she founded in 2000, but with several of the world’s greatest orchestras. Known for her fresh and expressive approach to Baroque music, she has garnered critical acclaim and several international awards with her own ensemble, including Victoires de la Musique Classique, ECHOs, Gramophone Awards, and Grammy nominations.

This box set gathers the finest vocal recordings (opera, sacred music) from the Vivaldi Edition by some of the most reputed artists of today. Also it features the main vocal ranges: soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, tenor, bass.