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A male soprano rather than a countertenor -- his voice never broke -- Samuel Mariño has an agile voice that enables him to specialize in demanding parts in Baroque and Classical-period operas and oratorios. He is also the founder of a historically oriented ensemble of his own.

Mariño was born in 1993 in Caracas, Venezuela. He matriculated at Venezuela's National Conservatory in Caracas, studying piano and voice, and he also took ballet courses at the country's National School of Dance. His turn toward early music came when he performed with the Baroque ensemble Camerata Barroca, an ensemble that boasted not only Venezuelan star Gustavo Dudamel among its roster of guest conductors but also foreign figures like the Theodore Kuchar and, most importantly, the Baroque music specialist Helmuth Rilling. Mariño traveled to France for further courses at the Conservatoire de Paris and has continued his studies, mentored by the lyric soprano Barbara Bonney. He has been supported by a scholarship from the Rotary Club of Salzburg. Prizes during the 2017-2018 season helped Mariño's career along. He won the interpretation award in the International Singing Competition at the Opéra de Marseille and the audience prize at Germany's Neue Stimmen Competition. In 2018, Mariño made his European stage debut at the Handel Festival in Halle, Germany, performing the role of Alessandro in Handel's Berenice to great success and earning a nomination from the magazine OpernWelt as the Best Revelation Artist.

Mariño soon found himself in demand for Baroque roles by Handel, Gluck, and other composers. In Budapest in the 2018-2019 season, he was heard in Bach's Mass in B minor, BWV 232. He has also appeared in bel canto operatic roles, including Oscar in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, Romeo in Bellini's I Capuleti ed I Montecchi, Arsace in Rossini's Aureliano in Palmira, and as Maria in Bernstein's West Side Story. In 2019, Mariño founded his own group, Ensemble Teseo, aimed at bringing forgotten Baroque works and techniques to operatic and concert stages. Mariño released his debut album, Care Pupille, featuring arias by Handel and Gluck, on the Orfeo label in 2020, moving to the major Decca label for the recital Sopranista in 2022. ~ James Manheim

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was not only one of the greatest composers of the Classical period, but one of the greatest of all time. Surprisingly, he is not identified with radical formal or harmonic innovations, or with the profound kind of symbolism heard in some of Bach's works. Mozart's best music has a natural flow and irresistible charm, and can express humor, joy or sorrow with both conviction and mastery. His operas, especially his later efforts, are brilliant examples of high art, as are many of his piano concertos and later symphonies. Even his lesser compositions and juvenile works feature much attractive and often masterful music.

Mozart was the last of seven children, of whom five did not survive early childhood. By the age of three he was playing the clavichord, and at four he began writing short compositions. Young Wolfgang gave his first public performance at the age of five at Salzburg University, and in January 1762, he performed on harpsichord for the Elector of Bavaria. There are many astonishing accounts of the young Mozart's precocity and genius. At the age of seven, for instance, he picked up a violin at a musical gathering and sight-read the second part of a work with complete accuracy, despite his never having had a violin lesson.

In the years 1763-1766, Mozart, along with his father Leopold, a composer and musician, and sister Nannerl, also a musically talented child, toured London, Paris, and other parts of Europe, giving many successful concerts and performing before royalty. The Mozart family returned to Salzburg in November 1766. The following year young Wolfgang composed his first opera, Apollo et Hyacinthus. Keyboard concertos and other major works also came from his pen.

In 1769, Mozart was appointed Konzertmeister at the Salzburg Court by the Archbishop. Beginning that same year, the Mozarts made three tours of Italy, where the young composer studied Italian opera and produced two successful efforts, Mitridate and Lucio Silla. In 1773, Mozart was back in Austria, where he spent most of the next few years composing. He wrote all his violin concertos between 1774 and 1777, as well as Masses, symphonies, and chamber works.

In 1780, Mozart wrote his opera Idomeneo, which became a sensation in Munich. After a conflict with the Archbishop, Mozart left his Konzertmeister post and settled in Vienna. He received a number of commissions and took on a well-paying but unimportant Court post. In 1782 Mozart married Constanze Weber and took her to Salzburg the following year to introduce her to his family. 1782 was also the year that saw his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail staged with great success.

In 1784, Mozart joined the Freemasons, apparently embracing the teachings of that group. He would later write music for certain Masonic lodges. In the early and mid-1780s, Mozart composed many sonatas and quartets, and often appeared as soloist in the 15 piano concertos he wrote during this period. Many of his commissions were for operas now, and Mozart met them with a string of masterpieces. Le nozze di Figaro came 1786, Don Giovanni in 1787, Così fan tutte in 1790, and Die Zauberflöte in 1791. Mozart made a number of trips in his last years, and while his health had been fragile in previous times, he displayed no serious condition or illness until he developed a fever of unknown origin near the end of 1791. ~ Robert Cummings

One of the great masters of 18th century opera, Gluck is known for his elegant synthesis of the French and Italian operatic traditions, exemplified by such remarkable works as Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste. A native of the Upper Palatinate, Gluck first studied with the Czech cellist and composer (and Franciscan friar) Bohuslav Cernohorsky, later continuing his studies with Sammartini in Italy. Already known as an opera composer in the 1740s, Gluck visited Paris and London, where he met Handel. He married in 1750, settling in Vienna as an opera conductor.

In 1762, Gluck wrote his Orfeo ed Euridice, heralding a new era in the history of opera. Combining the Classical ideals of beauty and simplicity with an innate sense of dramatic impetus, it broke down many of the overwrought formal conventions of the Baroque and set the standard for a whole generation of operatic composers. In many ways, opera in the 19th century had its conception in the works of Gluck.

While Gluck achieved wide fame in his own time, his works are rare in opera houses today; he is primarily remembered as a reformer and revolutionary. In his dedication to Alceste, Gluck wrote that he "sought to confine music to its true function of serving poetry by expressing feelings and the situations of the story without interrupting and cooling off the action through useless and superfluous ornaments." This statement has often been interpreted as a desire to subordinate music to poetry; however, what inspired Gluck's reform was his belief that music gains in expressiveness when it is properly balanced with poetry. Thus, for example, by abolishing the traditional strict separation of recitative and aria, Gluck used music as a means of maintaining an uninterrupted flow of the dramatic action. Gluck's librettist for Orfeo ed Euridice, Alceste, and Paride ed Elena -- the three works best representing his reformist ideas -- was Raniero de Calzabigi, a poet and critic who anticipated some of the composer's fundamental ideas concerning poetry and music. For example, Calzabigi opposed the traditional poetic approach to mythology, exemplified by Pietro Metastasio, the greatest librettist of the opera seria tradition. While Metastasio's mythological figures appear as thinly disguised 18th century characters, Calzabigi's poetry strives to create an atmosphere of timelessness, which perfectly suited Gluck's artistic intentions.

After bringing his reforms to fruition, Gluck had several new works produced in Paris. The most remarkable of these works is Armide (1777), based on an old libretto by Philippe Quinault, which Lully used for his eponymous work in 1686. Viewed by conservatives as an attack on the French musical and literary traditions, Gluck's operas were targeted by a literary cabal, which decided to embrace Niccolò Piccinni, a respected composer of comic operas, as a standard-bearer. In a literary squabble reminiscent of the "quarrel of the buffoons" in 1752, the traditionalists proclaimed the superiority of traditional (that is: Italian, or, more precisely, Metastasian) opera over French opera, represented by the iconoclastic Gluck. It should be noted that the two composers, who respected each other, refused to participate in the war of words, leaving the polemics to Parisian pseudo-intellectuals.

In essence, Gluck's victory over his adversaries was the triumph of music. His works are regarded as seminal contributions to musical drama, and his ideas were gradually accepted, first by Piccinni himself, and later by Cherubini, who flourished as an opera composer in the 1790s and early 1800s. In the 19th century, Gluck's approach to opera was adopted by Spontini, who, in turn, influenced Berlioz as an opera composer. ~ Zoran Minderovic

Andrea Marcon is a versatile figure, central to the Baroque music scene in his native Italy as an organist, harpsichordist, conductor, and scholar. He has also performed standard repertory and has a substantial discography, some of it on major labels.

Marcon was born in Treviso on February 6, 1963. He was a boy singer at the Treviso Cathedral. His first professional interest was the organ, stimulated by the large concentration of historical organs in that city, and he took lessons with Vanni Ussardi and went on to the Castelfranco Veneto. From 1983 to 1987, Marcon studied at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, graduating after studies in organ, harpsichord, early music, and performance practice. His principal teachers were organist Jean-Claude Zehnder, harpsichordist Jesper Christensen, and viol player Jordi Savall. During his first year in Basel, Marcon formed an early music ensemble called Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca; it earned plaudits and remained in existence until 1997. He had further instruction from Ton Koopman, Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini, and Hans van Nieuwkoop, among others. Marcon was a prize winner at the 1985 International Bach-Handel Competition in Bruges, Belgium, and took first prizes at the 1986 Paul Hofhaimer Organ Competition in Innsbruck, Austria, and the 1991 Bologna Harpsichord Competition. In 1992, Marcon made his recording debut with other organists on the Koch Schwann album Festal Music for Three Organs and Organ Four Hands. His solo debut came two years later on Divox with the album Alessandro Scarlatti: Opere per Organo e Cembalo. His next album on Divox, The Heritage of Frescobaldi (1995), earned wide critical acclaim and won several prizes.

Marcon has been active as a conductor, organist, and harpsichordist. He founded the Venice Baroque Orchestra in 1997 and remains its conductor; under his leadership, the orchestra has revived several unknown works of Italian Baroque opera and has made popular recordings of several Vivaldi favorites. In 2009, he became conductor of the venerable La Cetra Baroque orchestra in Basel, Switzerland; he has made several recordings with that group for the Deutsche Grammophon label and remains conductor of that group as well. Marcon has been a guest conductor with major symphony orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Bavarian Radio Symphony, and the Munich Philharmonic. In 2017, he conducted Vivaldi's oratorio Juditha Triumphans at Carnegie Hall in New York on the 300th anniversary of the work's premiere. In 2022, Marcon and La Cetra released a new recording of Monteverdi's Christmas Vespers on Deutsche Grammophon. He is on the faculty at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and gives master classes in various European cities. ~ James Manheim

A composer who was quite familiar to Mozart's operatic audiences, Domenico Cimarosa was the prolific creator of over 60 operas. He was the son of a poor bricklayer, coming from a working-class family. He studied music at the Conservatorio Santa Maria di Loreto from 1761 until 1772. Among his teachers was the famous Piccinni, the rival of Gluck in France. His first opera was Le stravaganza del conte. It premiered in Naples in 1772, and its success was such that it brought Cimarosa immediate recognition. Cimarosa spent the next several years in Rome and Naples, and composed over twenty operas for these two cities. His operas were performed internationally in Paris, Vienna, Dresden, and London. In 1787, Catherine II invited him to St. Petersburg. During his stay in Russia, Cimarosa continued to compose at a prodigious rate. La Cleopatra and La vergine del sole are two works that were staged in 1788. Subsequently, Leopold II of Austria engaged him as court Kapellmeister in Vienna, to fill the position vacated by Salieri. One of Cimarosa's greatest successes was staged in Vienna. Il matrimonio segreto, a delightful comic opera full of invention and wit, immensely pleased the Emperor. He gave the entire cast supper, and had them perform the entire opera again that same evening. Although lacking Mozart's depth, Cimarosa's music does possess some of Mozart's qualities -- in particular, a gift for the comic, buffo style.

After the death of the Emperor, Salieri was reappointed Kapellmeister, and Cimarosa was released. He left Vienna and returned to Naples where he entered the service of the King. He was hailed in Naples as a great operatic hero, and his Il matrimonio segreto was performed 57 times running. However, Cimarosa's last years were marked by misfortune. When the French Republican army marched into Naples, Cimarosa enthusiastically declared his support of the revolution. He was immediately thrown into prison and condemned to death. The King eventually released him, but banished him from Naples. Broken in spirit, Cimarosa attempted to return to Russia, but died in Venice in 1801. Because of rumors that he was poisoned, the government was obliged to perform an autopsy. In addition to operas, Cimarosa left behind oratorios, masses, and cantatas, and some instrumental music.