Pergolesi: L'Olimpiade

More than 60 composers set Metastasio's libretto for *L'Olimpiade* to music. Among them are Caldara, Vivaldi, Hasse, Leo and Scarlatti, as well as Piccinni, Paisiello and Cherubini, but also Pergolesi, who performed his "Olimpiade" during the carnival of 1735 at the Teatro Tordinona in Rome. It would be his last opera seria, as the composer died the following year at the age of just twenty-five. His version is considered by many to be the most inspired of all, characterized by musical originality and a cheerful freshness that is at once brilliant and refined. After the rediscovery of the unpublished Mass in D major, Giulio Prandi and his Ghislieri-Ensemble return to Pergolesi with a recording of his operatic masterwork, which was made in the 18th-century theater in Jesi, his birthplace: an initiative of the Pergolesi-Spontini Foundation, which has been championing his legacy for many years.