The Handel anniversary year continues apace with three festival productions using newly-published volumes from the Halle Handel Edition: Schwetzingen is the first on 21 May with Ezio (director: Günter Krämer, conductor: Attilio Cremonesi), Halle follows on 5 June with Il Floridante (Vincent Boussard / Christopher Moulds) and Salzburg completes the trio beginning on 25 July with a new production of Handel’s last oratorio Theodora in the Großes Festspielhaus (Christof Loy / Ivor Bolton). There’s a particularly unusual contribution from the Leipzig Bach Festival: on 17 and 18 June, at the Kulturgut Ermlitz (near Leipzig), Georg Philipp Telemann’s arrangement of Handel’s Riccardo Primo will be presented for the first time using the recently-published volume in the Telemann Edition (Andreas Baumann / Michael Schönheit).

Armide, Thésée and the Comédies-ballets. Thanks to the Complete Edition, Jean-Baptiste Lully begins to take his place again on the stage. Another Baroque composer who is assuming his place in the first rank.

Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Dramma per musica La Semiramide riconosciuta after a libretto by Pietro Metastasio has been staged in october 2008 again 260 years after its premiere in the Vienna Burgtheater. It can be seen from 18 October at the Mainz Staatstheater. Peer Boysen is the director of the co-production with the Hochschule für Musik Mainz, and the musical director is Michael Millard. The orchestral material for this exciting performance project has been specially produced by Bärenreiter publishers, based on the score of the Gluck Complete Edition.

Patricia B. Brauner’s critical new edition of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia is being received with ever increasing interest. The score has been published earlier than announced and the Critical Commentary presents some previously unpublished material, such as arias Rossini wrote later and the composer’s ornamentation to several numbers in the opera. The final chapter of the Critical Commentary contains an entire compendium of contemporary ornamentation, dated and described in collaboration with the American Rossini specialist Will Crutchfield. Three new productions, still to receive their first performances in the current season, are already using the new edition: Leipzig Opera (director: Claus Guth, conductor: Andreas Schüller) starting on 6 June; the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London (Patrice Caurier & Moshe Leiser / Antonio Pappano) from 4 July and the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe (Dominique Mentha / Justin Brown) from 11 July.