Admired for her remarkable creative imagination and exemplary musicianship, soprano Patricia Petibon, in her newest album for Deutsche Grammophon, offers a treasure-trove of fascinating Baroque curiosities guaranteed to enthral both the Baroque aficionado and the casual listener.

This is first recording for Challenge Classics by the very highly-rated Al Ayre Español and its conductor Eduardo López Banzo - and the beginning of a longterm partnership. The sacred cantatas performed on this Hybrid SACD are by José de Nebra, the ‘father’ of Spanish opera and Zarzuela.

The versatile Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado, whose international profile has been rising in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years, seems to tackle all genres with alacrity, but Baroque period-instrument performance is his main calling card. He's a great choice, then, for the re-launch of Deutsche Grammophon’s Archiv Produktion imprint, with this disc of orchestral music associated with Farinelli’s long tenure at the Spanish court -much of it dug out of archives and recorded for the first time.

Este fantástico disco pensado especialmente para los amantes del Barroco, muestra la realidad de la música teatral española al despuntar el siglo XVIII. Con un poderío instrumental impresionante, unos arreglos hermosos y mucho talento, el disco propuesto por el director Fahmi Alqhai al frente de su Accademia del Piacere deja claro cómo el estilo italiano arraiga en España de mano de la corte borbónica fundiéndose con los ritmos y armonías locales que tanto influyeron en Sebastián Durón, uno de los nombres fundamentales de la renovación de la música española del momento.

Since it's founding in Freiburg in 1958, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi has been one of the most important and ambitious labels for period performances. Over decades, globally-acclaimed recordings were created with outstanding musicians. The limited edition "Deutsche Harmonia Mundi: 100 Great Recordings" contains 100 outstanding DHM recordings with some of the most important and best artists in their field: Nuria Rial, Dorothee Mields, Al Ayre Espanol, Hille Perl, Concentus Musicus Wien, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the Freiburger Barockorchester, Skip Sempé, Capriccio Stravagante, La Petite Bande, Gustav Leonhardt, Andrew Lawrence-King, Frieder Bernius, the Balthasar-Neumann-Chor, Thomas Hengelbrock and many others.

José de Nebra, born in 1702 to a family of musicians from Aragón, already made his career in Madrid as a young man: at the age of 17 he took over the position of organist from Tomás de Victoria and also celebrated great success at the opera. In 1736 he was appointed organist and later vice kapellmeister of the Royal Chapel. From this time on, his creative focus was on sacred music and he created more than 170 sacred compositions. After the coronation of Fernando VI and his wife Bárbara de Braganza, the musical work at the court experienced a great revival: the queen brought the famous musicians Scarlatti and Farinelli to the Spanish court and the Royal Chapel also experienced a great boom.

For more than two centuries Naples was a province of Spain, and after this ended in 1707 the remarkable cross-fertilisation of culture between them did not stop. Much of the Italian music featured here has been edited from sources in Spanish collections. The vast bulk of it is devoted to Leonardo Vinci (one of the most celebrated Italian opera composers of the 1720s). Only one short piece tacked onto the end is actually Spanish: a colourful fandango from José de Nebra's zarzuela Vendado es amor,no es ciego (1744) in which three singers mockingly compare the squabbling goddesses of classical antiquity to bickering mothers-in-law.