Gluck’s ballet Les Amours d’Alexandre et de Roxane is published in the Complete Edition.

(7.2.2013) The myth of Acis and Galatea from Ovid’s Metamorphoses occupied Handel throughout his career, firstly inspiring him to compose a large-scale Italian cantata in 1708, then an English masque in 1718. Less well-known, because it has only been available in fragmentary form until now, is his third setting of this subject dating from 1732, a serenata in two languages, English and Italian, rich in musical form and magnificent tone colours. This version is now being published for the first time in a fully-edited form as part of the Halle Handel Edition. It receives concert performances on 20 March 2013 in the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Paris, and 25 March in the Theater an der Wien, Vienna, with a distinguished line-up of soloists and the Basel Chamber Orchestra conducted by Paul Goodwin. The late version of Acis and Galatea receives its first staged performance in this edition on 14 June at the Goethe-Theater, Bad Lauchstädt as part of the Handel Festival Halle (Concerto Royal, conductor: Sebastian Breuning, production: Ute M. Engelhardt).

No fewer than 28 operas by Francesco Cavalli, the famous Monteverdi pupil of his day, survive. The edition Francesco Cavalli – Opere reveals this early Baroque world once more.

2014 is also the 300th anniversary of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s birth. Two opera houses in the place where he worked are anticipating this anniversary with new productions: the first is at Theater an der Wien on 8 November with the rarely-performed Iphigenie en Aulide (Torsten Fischer/Alessandro de Marchi), followed by the Staatsoper, which stages the Paris version of Alceste beginning on 12 November (Christof Loy/Ivor Bolton).

In the run-up to the Rameau anniversary year in 2014 marking the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death, his rarely-performed one-act ballet Anacréon will be presented by vocal soloists, the Choir of Magdalen College and the renowned Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Jonathan Huw Williams conducts the first performance of his new edition of the work, published in the Opera Omnia Rameau, in a concert performance on 9 November in the Sheldonian Theatre Oxford.

(22.11.2014) The Volkstheater Rostock is offering a special bel canto highlight on 9 January 2015, a concert performance of Rossini’s oper Maometto II using the new Critical Edition by Hans Schellevis. On the podium is the renowned English Rossini specialist David Parry, who conducted this seldom-performed opera last year at the Garsington Festival and has recorded it on CD.

Handel set his opera Poro in distant India. However, the conflicts that develop in it are universally applicable and enabled Handel to express through it his entire compositional maturity.