Alan Curtis, described by the New York Times’ as “one of the great scholar-musicians of recent times”, conducts a brilliant cast, including Sonia Prina, Ann Hallenberg, Max-Emanuel Cencic and Topi Lehtipuu, in the original, 1750 version of Gluck’s Ezio.

Alan Curtis feels that Gluck’s opera Ezio is “from a dramatic point of view, perhaps the finest of Gluck’s pre-Orfeo operas”. This original version of Ezio received its premiere in Prague in 1750, some 12 years before Gluck’s revolutionary Orfeo ed Euridice was seen in Vienna.

Written to a libretto by the prolific and influential Metastasio, Ezio exemplifies the formal opera seria that Gluck sought to leave behind with his so-called reform operas such as Orfeo and Alceste; but after Orfeo’s epoch-making premiere in Vienna in 1762, he revised Ezio for performance at the city’s Burgtheater in 1763.