Claudio Monteverdi

With Renaissance, Shani Diluka embarks on a musical exploration of the era of the same name, which laid the foundation for Western thought and sensibility. She focuses primarily on two key centers of influence: humanist Italy and Elizabethan England. Program: I. Renaissance music, emergence and dissemination of the first scores thanks to Gutenberg (Eccles, Dowland, Byrd, etc.) II. Renaissance and early humanists: music of the spheres becomes music of the humanities (Palestrina, Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, etc.) III. The Renaissance and the Golden Ratio: proportion and beauty (Purcell, Handel, etc.) IV. The Renaissance, a decisive legacy in the history of music thanks to polyphony, harmony, and the development of the relationship between text and music (Scarlatti, Bach, etc.)

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Countertenor Carlo Vistoli takes us on a musical journey through 17th-century Italy. The nascent opera genre was producing its first masterpieces at the time, with composers such as Monteverdi, Cesti, Cavalli and Stradella. These genius composers laid the foundations for opera and helped establish it as a major art form. The programme includes arias, love laments and scenes of madness.

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In Zurich, conductor Nikolas Harnoncourt realizes his vision of reviving the work of opera pioneer Claudio Monteverdi using historical performance practices, brilliantly staged by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. The Monteverdi cycle brings the composer and his operas back into the public consciousness. In 1978, L’Orfeo is recorded on film.

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In memory of the countless victims of armed conflict, Patricia Kopatchinskaja presents a concert conceived as a mosaic of deeply moving music and texts from a wide variety of sources and authors. The violinist breaks down the traditional barrier between the stage and the audience.

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How to take the place of the empress of Rome? Poppaea, a courtesan and mistress of Emperor Nero, removes every obstacle that stands between her and the throne: she leaves her lover, Otho, the philosopher Seneca commits suicide, Empress Octavia is banished, and finally she achieves her goal, marrying Nero. Through Monteverdi's music, this triumph of immorality is elevated into a hymn to the power of desire. Monteverdi's last opera is also the first masterpiece of the genre, extraordinarily and enduringly modern. Here, it is filmed at the Opera Royal de Versailles, with a young and committed cast, guided through a mafia-baroque world by director Ted Huffman and the sensational Leonardo Garcia Alarcon!

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Mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre and lutenist Thomas Dunford perform Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, and Handel in this musical exploration of the Renaissance in the Lombard city.

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A unique opera production, in which the stage and audience merge into a single, intimate space: the carriage of an imaginary underground subway train. Artists and audience embark on a journey into the underground world, together with Monteverdi's Orfeo, in a totally immersive experience.

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More than 200 young singers from all over the world take part in the first edition of a competition focused on the Baroque repertoire. The prize is a leading role in Handel's Alcina. An authoritative international jury. In the fantastic setting of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, everything is decided in a few minutes of audition.

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Antonio Florio, conducting the Orchestra and Choir of the Teatro Regio, tackles Claudio Monteverdi's rich score. The cast includes Roberta Invernizzi, Mauro Borgioni, Francesca Boncompagni, Monica Bacelli, Luigi De Donato, and Luca Tittoto, internationally renowned soloists and recognized experts in the field of Baroque opera.

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Love conquers all – ruthlessly and irresistibly – as Emperor Nero and his mistress Poppea remove the obstacles to their union. At Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu David Alden’s visually sumptuous production, with its suggestions of a giant game of chess, puts the opera’s potent blend of sex and politics in a context that sets ancient against modern– just as the action juxtaposes scurrilous comedy and stark drama. Monteverdi’s magnificent score, meanwhile, accommodates intrigue, wit, nobility, tragedy and sensuality, and, led by the intense Sarah Connolly and the delectable Miah Persson, the cast brings both drama and music startlingly to life.

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The Full Monteverdi follows the simultaneous break-up of six couples, from shocking revelation, vengeful anger and erotic longing for reconciliation, as an ensemble film. Vulnerable and disarming, it draws viewers into its emotional journey and intensely moving portrait of contemporary love.

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Claudio Monteverdi's operatic adaptation of this story from Homer's The Odyssey receives a modern and distinctive staging in this 2002 production directed by Humphrey Burton for Les Arts Florissants. Penelope Marijana Mijanovic is left to her own devices when her husband, the heroic Ulysses Kresimir Spicer, goes off to fight in the Trojan Wars. After many years alone, Penelope finds herself attracting a number of suitors who wish to claim her hand; however, what she doesn't realize is that jealous Ulysses has his ways of keeping an eye on her. Production of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence; from the Theatre du Jeu de Paume.

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Taped live in Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu on January 31, 2002, this L'Orfeo is both a visual delight and a musically satisfying representation of Monteverdi's opera

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Experience Claudio Monteverdi's three-act opera in the environment it was meant to be seen with this release of a filmed performance captured live during a 2000 production staged at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence in France. Mireille Delunsch, Anne Sofie Von Otter, and Sylvie Brunet star, and conductor Marc Minkowski leads the Les Musiciens du Louvre, Grenoble. Klaus Michael Grüber directs for stage.

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First seen at La Monnaie in Brussels on 13 May 1998, this production of Monteverdi’s L’ORFEO seen through the eyes of Trisha Brown and René Jacobs has become an operatic classic in a few short years. This is doubtless because it offers a total symbiosis of music, text and movement – described by the critic of the Daily Telegraph of London as being ‘as close to the perfect dance opera as I have ever seen’. Or to quote Gilles Macassar in Télérama: ‘In the pit and onstage, the Brussels production has only one watchword: mobility, nimbleness, dexterity. The singers run, fly, whirl like dancers defying gravity. From the flies down to the footlights, the whole theatre is under a fantastic spell.’ For Christophe Vetter, on ConcertoNet: ‘This Orfeo can be seen again and again with immense pleasure. . . . René Jacobs’s conducting continues to arouse admiration for its precision, its stylistic rigour, its inexhaustible inventiveness and its feeling for the contrasts so vital to this repertoire.’

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Live performance, part of Monteverdi cycle staged by Oper Zürich with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting the Zürich Opera House Monteverdi Ensemble. Staged and directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle

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Live performance, part of Monteverdi cycle staged by Oper Zürich with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting the Zürich Opera House Monteverdi Ensemble. Staged and directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle

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Live performance, part of Monteverdi cycle staged by Oper Zürich with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting the Zürich Opera House Monteverdi Ensemble. Staged and directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. Filmed 28 March – 20 April 1978 in Vienna, sound recorded 1 – 25 December 1977 in Zürich.

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Monteverdi's mini-opera, starring Cathy Berberian.

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Monteverdi's mini-opera, starring Cathy Berberian.

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In the magnificent rooms of the Galleria Borghese in Rome, John Eliot Gardiner and his ensembles The Monteverdi Choir and The English Baroque Soloists bring together the music of Claudio Monteverdi and the paintings of Caravaggio. The encounter of two works whose creators revolutionised their disciplines.

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