Furio Zanasi

Taped live in Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu on January 31, 2002, this L'Orfeo is both a visual delight and a musically satisfying representation of Monteverdi's opera

In the magnificent rooms of the Galleria Borghese in Rome, John Eliot Gardiner and his ensembles The Monteverdi Choir and The English Baroque Soloists bring together the music of Claudio Monteverdi and the paintings of Caravaggio. The encounter of two works whose creators revolutionised their disciplines.

La serva padrona, or The Maid Turned Mistress, is a 1733 intermezzo by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736) to a libretto by Gennaro Federico, after the play by Jacopo Angello Nelli. It is some 40 minutes long, in two parts without overture, and was written as light-hearted staged entertainment between the acts of Pergolesi's serious opera Il prigionier superbo. More specifically each of the two parts, set in the same dressing room, played during an intermission of the three-act opera to amuse people who remained in their seats.

Rinaldo Alessandrini, one of the most eminent baroque and pre-baroque music specialist, conducts Monteverdi's Orfeo, performed by singers who have been working with the Maestro for many years, and who now play in the middle of Robert Wilson's fairy sets...