[ Harmonia Mundi Heritage / 2 CD ]
Release Date: Thursday 20 August 2015
This item is currently out of stock. It may take 6 or more weeks to obtain from when you place your order as this is a specialist product.
CLASSICAL CD OF THE WEEK, The Sunday Times
RECORD OF THE WEEK, The Guardian
CD OF THE WEEK, The Daily Telegraph
"Spering fields an excellent cast headed by the Swedish mezzo Ann Hallenberg and the well-contrasted sopranos Johanna Stojkovic and Sunhae Im. Spering's conducting is a sheer delight."
Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times
"Boasting a good cast and driving direction from Andreas Spering, this German radio recording makes a persuasive case for reviving a work that disappeared after its 1728 premiere."
Andrew Clarke, The Independent
"Handelians will not want to miss it."
Anthony Holden, The Observer
Handel's opera Siroe, rè di Persia was premiered at London's Haymarket Theatre on 17 February 1728. Not entirely by coincidence, in the year following George II's accession to the throne, it forms with Riccardo Primo, rè d'Inghilterra and Tolomeo a kind of triptych on royal subjects. But this was also the first time Handel had set a libretto by a young beginner, Pietro Antonio Trapassi, who would come to symbolise eighteenth-century Italian opera, and, under the name of Metastasio, wrote more than 27 librettos which inspired around 850 works by 260 composers.