In 2002, Riccardo Chailly conducted the first Turandot to use the new completion by Luciano Berio at the Amsterdam Muziektheater directed by Nikolaus Lehnhoff. 15 years later, the same team reunited to mount it at La Scala and commit it to video. Alfano’s completion sought to continue the spectacle but, in its rush to wrap up the story, is dramatically implausible – poor Liú is soon forgotten and love conquers all. Berio’s alternative is low key and pensive, its modernist touches may jar the ear but it’s more respectful than Alfano’s gauche reprise of “that” tune. Lehnhoff’s production has some curiosities but I “get” his neo-Brechtian-meets-Commedia-dell’arte aesthetic and there are some arresting images. Stemme is splendid as the cruel princess, her warm tone evincing a humanity behind the ice; her Wagnerian credentials allow her to ride the maelstrom from the pit in thrilling fashion. Antonenko does well to match her, though his sound has tightened since his fine 2008 Salzburg Otello. Maria Agrest is a lovely full-toned Liú, and the Milan chorus is superb whether delicately awestruck or baying for blood. Topping all is the brilliance of Chailly’s conducting – this could well be the finest account of the score…

We can thank the popularity of Walter Scott’s wildly romantic novels for the popularity of Scotland as setting for 19th-century Italian operas. If you add a German dramatist in Heinrich Heine and an Irish orchestra and chorus then this highly attractive new release of Pietro Mascagni’s neglected masterpiece Guglielmo Ratcliff has a truly global provenance. The composer first started work on it as a student in Milan following an unsuccessful love affair but it got put aside. After the success of Cavalleria Rusticana, Mascagni completed it but the tenor role was so challenging that after a successful premiere and a short run the work fell into obscurity. The hero is the spurned lover of Maria, disturbed since boyhood by an apparition of two lovers who can never have each other. Every time Maria is about to marry, her suitor gets killed – no prizes for guessing the perpetrator! The action centres on four monologues, one by Maria’s father MacGregor, two by Ratcliff himself and one by Margherita (“the mad woman of the castle”). This Wexford Festival production under Francesco Cilluffo is a corker. Angelo Villari thrills as Ratcliff, aided by a mainly Italian solo cast with the notable exception of…

This startling new recording presents a modern form of pasticcio or, as countertenor and project originator Philippe Jaroussky says, a work that was “conceived as a kind of opera in miniature or as a cantata for two solo voices and chorus.” It also reminds us there were other fine operas on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice written after Striggio and Monteverdi’s famous favola in musica. (As there were, of course, before it, such as Rinuccini and Peri’s 1600 L’Euridice. Here again we have the tragic and all-too-familiar story of Orpheus’s doomed attempt to rescue his beloved Eurydice, who had perished after being bitten by a serpent, from Hades’ realm. But by stitching together elements of three operas written decades apart – Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607), Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo (1647) and Antonio Sartorio’s L’Orfeo (1672) – we are introduced not just to bracing chiaroscuro effects that serve to heighten the drama; such anachronisms also demonstrate the changing styles of, and tastes in, music over nearly 70 years of the Baroque period. This was clearly a labour of love for Jaroussky (Orpheus). And what a fine thing to get such collaborators as Hungarian soprano Emöke Baráth (Eurydice), I Barocchisti, Coro della Radiotelevisione…

Even in Benjamin Britten’s day, his operatic treatment of Livy’s reported act of Etruscan on Roman violence raised eyebrows. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Kaufmann isn't the only thing that impresses in a superlative night of Wagner singing.

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