Amilcare Ponchielli's sole operatic work La Gioconda made him a major figure in Italy. It was not just the title that made it such a success - 'La Gioconda' is the Italian term for the famous Leonardo da Vinci painting that is better known to the English-speaking world as 'Mona Lisa' - but rather its music and the poetic quality of Arrigo Boito's score. The production featured here was taken from a 1986 performance of the Vienna State Opera. Filippo Sanjust was responsible for production and set, Gerlinde Dill was in charge of choeography, whilst Adam Fischer conducted both choir and orchestra of the Vienna State Opera. Internationally renowned stars Eva Marton and Placido Domingo, who play the leading roles in the performance, ensure an unforgettable operatic experience.

The National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) and Music Director Gianandrea Noseda will release the first installment of their complete Beethoven symphony cycle, a recording of Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3.

RV and its companion tools, RVIO and RVLS have been created to support digital artists, directors, supervisors, and production crews who need reliable, flexible, high-performance tools to review image sequences, movie files, and audio. RV is clean and simple in appearance and has been designed to let users load, play, inspect, navigate and edit image sequences and audio as simply and directly as possible. RV's advanced features do not clutter its appearance but are available through a rich command-line interface, extensive hot keys and key-chords, and smart drag/drop targets. RV can be extensively customized for integration into proprietary pipelines. The RV Reference Manual has information about RV customization.This chapter provides quick-start guides to RV and RVIO. If you already have successfully installed RV, and want to get going right away, this chapter will show you enough to get started.

Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques make a foray into the Romantic repertoire with this tribute to Pauline Viardot, who was not only the most influential singer of the nineteenth century, but also a pedagogue and composer, whose gifts, personality and incomparable aura made her one of the leading figures of French Romanticism. Together the mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti and Christophe Rousset retrace Pauline Viardot’s versatile career and, taking up her great roles, present a musical portrait of a unique performer, who was unanimously acclaimed by the audiences of her time.

In view of the fact that the Monk of Salzburg is still only sporadically to be heard on concert programs of the German-language medieval scene, and that notice is hardly taken of him internationally, it seems to be time to again take a look at him – nearly thirty years after the first recording dedicated to him by the Ensemble for Early Music Augsburg. The melodic ideas are too accomplished, the profound texts too multifaceted to be able to ignore this composer and poet.