Following Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (2007), L’Orfeo is the second of Claudio Monteverdi’s operas to be published in Rinaldo Alessandrini’s edition. The editor introduces the principles adopted in his edition and draws particular attention to the highly-developed forms of declamation, which present great challenges to performers. Particular emphasis is placed on the differences between L’Orfeo and the later operas Poppea and Ulisse.

The Renaissance in Francesco Cavalli's operas continues unabated: the first performance of a new production of his masterwork Ercole amante composed in 1659 for Paris, augmented with excerpts from Jean-Baptiste Lully's original ballet music, was given on 11 January 2009 at De Nederlandse Opera Amsterdam. For this production, Spanish musicologist Álvaro Torrente has produced his second critical new Cavalli edition, following on from La Calisto. These are published in the complete works of Francesco Cavalli by Bärenreiter. He is also responsible for the edition of Lully's ballet music. Ivor Bolton conducts Concerto Köln in a production by David Alden. A must for all early music enthusiasts. Further performances take place on 15, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28 and 30 January 2009.

Othmar Schoeck’s 1927 opera Penthesilea has received two notable new productions in recent weeks, at the Theater Basel and the Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden. Uwe Schweikert has seen both productions and describes the two producers’ compelling approaches to the work.

Édouard Lalo’s opera Fiesque had to wait 140 years before it was performed in a concert version in Montpellier in 2006, and then was finally premiered on stage at the National Theatre Mannheim on 16 June 2007. Falling between a number opera and a through-composed piece, the work has qualities which make it interesting today, as Jens-Daniel Herzog’s Mannheim production showed.

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.

The performance material of Beethoven’s Fidelio, available at Bärenreiter · Alkor, is an advance publication compiled not from all, but from the major sources of the opera. It goes without saying that the standards of scholarly critical editions have been applied when converting these sources into the musical text. Still, uniform rules have not always been found for the opera's particular complex of sources or its generic and textual peculiarities. Most importantly, until now there has been no complete critical report to provide information on the sources, particularly regarding editorial decisions and the origins of certain alternative readings. Once these steps have been completed, Fidelio will appear in volumes IX/4 of the Complete Edition.