Gaetano Donizetti is renowned as a leading composer of the Italian romantic bel canto opera style during the first half of the 19th century. But in his earlier years and as a student of Simon Mayr his dramatic genius came to the fore in his settings of psalm texts for Vespers, a form then still popular in Italy both in secular and liturgical contexts. Donizetti’s Vesper Psalms are characterised by beautifully shaped operatic melodies and colourful orchestration on a grand scale, creating moments of real rhetorical force – outstanding features of works that have lain undiscovered in manuscript form for two centuries.

This remarkable set of world premiere recordings is a logical follow-up in a sequence of recordings with Franz Hauk, the world’s leading expert and exponent of the music of Johann Simon Mayr. Mayr was Donizetti’s teacher, and this association has been explored in the pupil’s additions to Mayr’s Requiem (857341920) released in December 2015, and the Donizetti/Mayr confluence that resulted in the Messa di Gloria and Credo in D (8573605) which appeared in December 2016.