Agrippina is brilliant, early Handel. Composed when he was just twenty-four, it was his first big hit in the theatre. It’s full of his fresh, exuberantly inventive music and sets one of the finest librettos Handel worked with. This beautiful production, with an elegant and colorful staging, was recorded at the exquisite Rococo palace theatre in Schwetzingen, built in 1752.

Antonio Salieri set Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor to music in 1799, and his work was successfully premiered in Vienna the same year. Michael Hampe staged Salieris’s Falstaff at the Schwetzingen SWR Festival in 1995 with similar success – wonderfully supported by the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Arnold Östman. The libretto by Carlo Prospero Defranceschi reduces Shakespeare’s original play to a few main characters and drastically simplifies the plot. This gives John Del Carlo, Teresa Ringholz, Richard Croft and Delores Ziegler a lot of space for their artistic interpretation and brilliant singing. The work lives from the wealth of the Italian opera buffa and absorbed influences from the German Singspiel (song-play), and delights with a number of great arias.

There's magic in these musical hills, as conductor Arnold Östman leads an exemplary performance of Die Zauberflöte on original instruments.Sumi Jo's breathtaking Queen of the Night is the queen of intonation, while Barbara Bonny's Pamina is a phrasing angel, from her pianissimo B flats to her gentle, yet heartfelt, "Ach ich fühl's." Singing as comfortably as a folk singer, Kurt Streit's lyrical, yet dramatic, Tamino is manly and heroic. Gilles Cachemaille is an appropriately charming Papageno, and all supporting performances are stellar. This crystal-clear interpretation must be as close to perfection as Mozart probably dreamed. A true treasure.

It is an elegantly comic performance with a light orchestral sound, brisk tempi and lighter voices than usual. This is not to say that the reading is lacking in gravitas and there are many felicitous moments. It is a good cast, headed by Håkan Hagegård in the title role. His Giovanni is a little lacking in menace, but is full of volatile energy and sung in a suave baritone voice. The standout performance is the Leporello of the French-Swiss bass-baritone Gilles Cachemaille; the quick and pointed recitatives between him and Hagegård really fizz and his Catalogue aria is a masterpiece of breath control. The two leading ladies are interestingly cast; Arleen Auger’ lighter-voiced than most Donna Annas, produces a rich, creamy sound, while the mezzo Della Jones is a fiery Donna Elvira, with the pungency of her high notes especially impressive.