A veritable compilation of Lully’s “greatest hits”: Carnaval–Mascarade royale, his final comédie-ballet, has never been revived in its entirety since its creation in 1675. Federico Maria Sardelli and Samuele Lastrucci, from the Istituto Lulli in Florence, are presenting it in its first modern-era staged version at the Teatro Comunale in Ferrara.
It is an event: a complete recording of the 18 cantatas by Johann Ludwig Bach, cousin of the famous Johann Sebastian—cantatas that the latter himself copied out and performed in Leipzig in 1726, exactly 300 years ago. For the occasion, keyboardist and conductor Johanna Soller presents the first complete recording.
In Lyon, Franck-Emmanuel Comte and his ensemble Le Concert de l’Hostel Dieu explore original paths between early music and other artistic disciplines. A meeting with a conductor whose motto is: explore, reveal, share.
Music director of the Coro e Orchestra Ghislieri and a tireless seeker of Baroque treasures, Giulio Prandi is the architect of a unique ecosystem in Pavia (Italy). He opens 2026 with the revival of Pelopida, an opera by the Franco-Maltese composer Girolamo Abos (1715–1760), at the Valletta Baroque Festival in Malta. Several ambitious projects will follow, from Neapolitan opera to sacred polyphonies, not to mention collaborations with the cultural institutions of his home city.
In an America where early music remains a scattered archipelago, the ensemble Blue Heron stands out like a beacon. Its founder, violinist and conductor Scott Metcalfe, has patiently woven a thread linking New England to old Europe. “We are isolated, yes—but free,” he says. For Total Baroque Magazine, he tells the story of how it all began… on a bus in Boston, in 1999!
The recording of The Four Seasons by Amandine Beyer and her ensemble Gli Incogniti (released in 2008) is among the benchmark interpretations of Vivaldi’s work. For the violinist, this recording was anything but a closed chapter in a “sound museum”: it was a sensory shock, a door opening onto the unknown and, more recently, a choreographed playground.
Fabio Biondi does not play Vivaldi: he makes Vivaldi speak through the violin. Between traditional Italian virtuosity and the finely crafted grammar of Baroque research, he has spent nearly fifty years defending the idea that music is a language rather than a mere question of tonality. We look back on a seminal encounter and his album of The Four Seasons, which went on to achieve international success.
A part of unprecedented research, harpsichordist and conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini unveils a Neapolitan circle of composers gravitating around the musician-prince Gesualdo at the turn of the seventeenth century. A discovery that redraws the map of the Italian madrigal, revealed in his album “Stravagante pensiero”.
