Haydn: Armida (complete opera recorded in 2000)

One of the very few recordings opera star Cecilia Bartoli made for Warner Classics' former labels Teldec & Erato, apart from three Mozart operas (Cosi fan tutte and Le nozze di Figaro with Daniel Barenboim and the rare Lucio Silla with Harnoncourt).

The terrific cast also features the great tenor Christoph Prégardien and famous French soprano Patricia Petibon.

The Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt was both a specialist of Classical era and a master of opera performances.

In the early 1950s, Harnoncourt founded Concentus Musicus Wien, the first professional orchestra in Europe to play on period instruments and dedicated to music of the pre-Romantic era. As Sir Nicholas Kenyon wrote in Gramophone after Harnoncourt's death:

"He wanted to explore why composers made their music sound as it did, to understand what their intentions were, to react to the instruments they used and to their sonorities, and to see how they could best be created anew in our time. He did not believe in 'authenticity' as such, and never used the word. Instead he questioned 'tradition' as laziness [as] Mahler had before him."