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.

Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini’s opera Der Sandmann, after themes by E. T. A. Hoffmann, receives its German premiere on 18 September at the Frankfurt Opera, taking over from the Theater Basel Christof Loy's original production. Like his first work in the genre, WUT, Scartazzini’s second opera introduces an equally exciting subject to the operatic stage. The libretto is by Thomas Jonigk, who transfers the story of the Sandman to the present, setting it in the milieu of a budding writer who inhabits a world between delusion and reality. The conductor in Frankfurt is Hartmut Keil. Further performances after the premiere are scheduled for 24 and 30 September, 3, 8, 13 and 23 October 2016. – Der Sandmann has just been released on CD: Musiques Suisses, MGB 6288. (photo: Janis Huber)

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.

Even before its premiere, Smetana began to alter his comic opera The Bartered Bride, the beginning of a long series of transformations and versions. An introduction on the publication of newly-set performance material from Bärenreiter Praha.