In 2025 the Salzburg Festival assembled a stellar cast and an exceptional orchestra for Dmitri Tcherniakov’s challenging but compelling production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto. It’s a contemporary setting with all the action taking place in the confines of a bunker, which appears to be sporadically under shell fire. Pretty much all of the issues raised by having all the characters in the small space all the time are cleverly resolved to create a very tightly wrought, tense piece of theatre.
Pursue Peace; Contemporary Chamber Music by Canadian Jewish Composers is the first recording by the Jewish Music at York initiative of Toronto’s York University. It features three works by living Canadian Jewish composers; Sid Robinovitch, Noam Lemish and James Rolfe. 
Lise Davidsen’s latest CD with Ed Gardner and the LPO features arias from five Verdi operas; Macbeth, Un ballo in maschera, La forza del destino, Don Carlo and Aida. It’s pretty good. 
Le Récital des Anges is a CD of Schubert songs orchestrated by Ian Cusson and Hector Berlioz plus the orchestral version of Ian’s Le Récital des Anges; a setting of six poems by Émile Nelligan. 
The Bauhaus is usually associated with architecture and industrial design but it also had a musical side. The musical archive is mostly unexplored but there’s now a project to publish and record as much as possible. The first recording to be released is Marc Blitzstein’s 1929 opera Parabola and Circula to an English libretto by George Whitsett. What’s really unusual is that all the characters are geometric shapes (or maybe concepts, since a point and a line don’t have “shape). These characters interact on a series of planes. It makes me curious to know whether composer or librettist were familiar with Edin Abbott’s Flatland though the opera is about love and philosophy rather than geometry and class (*).
Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher is a rather peculiar work. It’s scored for orchestra, adult and children’s choruses, solo singers and actors. There’s a lot of spoken word, usually accompanied by the orchestra or interleaved with singing. It’s important too, as Jeanne and her confessor, Brother Dominic, are both spoken roles. The text is a mix of French and Latin and the mood varies wildly from sombre, to grand, to liturgical, to reflective, to farcical. Each scene (there are eleven plus a prologue) is very much it’s own thing. The music is basically tonal, with some chromaticism, but it varies widely in mood to suit the needed atmosphere for each scene.
The work under consideration here is Francesca Caccini’s Il liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina. Written as a court entertainment in Florence in 1625 it’s almost certainly the first work of its kind by a woman. It was commissioned by the two female regents of Florence; Christine of Lorraine and Maria Maddalena of Austria, for the visit of Wladyslaw, Prince of Poland and Sweden. Can it really be thought of as an opera though? It’s from that period when gentlemanly (and ladylike) scholars were trying to reconstruct what they believed Classical Greek drama had been like, though in this case the theatrical elements are mixed with dances (that would have been performed by the ladies and gentlemen of the Court) and even an equestrian ballet which might prove tricky in a modern opera house!
