2008

Grieg's incidental music for Ibsen's play Peer Gynt (1874-5) won immediate success and ranks among his most enduringly popular compositions, its huge range of orchestral tone-colours and creative use of space captured on this recording by placing actors, chorus, and folk musicians both onstage and behind the scenes. Foran Sydens Kloster, composed in 1871 as an interlude for Bjørnson's heroic play Arnljot Gelline, and Bergliot, a monodrama written in the same year and orchestrated in 1875, reveal Grieg as a master composer of dramatic and lyrical stage music.

Armide represents the culmination of the long and fruitful career of Jean-Baptiste Lully, the most powerful musician at the court of Louis XIV and the first important composer of French opera. Though not his final composition, Armide was his last complete tragédie en musique and the last work he wrote in collaboration with librettist Philippe Quinault. It was an instant and enduring success: a crowd-pleaser at its initial production and a perennial favourite of audiences and critics in the 18th century.

Internationally acclaimed Chinese film-maker Chen Kaige delivers an opulent staging of the fairy-tale story of Chinese Princess Turandot, who will only marry a prince capable of solving her riddles. With sumptuous costumes and palace sets designed in China, Kaige's production adds a compellingly authentic accent to Puccini's exotic orchestral palette. Zubin Mehta and his brilliant Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana offer "genuine fireworks of sound". Maria Guleghina triumphs as Turandot.

Libera: Eternal/Best of... [2 CD]