The Early Music Show - Opera Profiles - Opera Profile: Cavalli's Giasone

As part of the "Opera on the BBC" season, the Early Music Show begins a monthly series celebrating baroque opera, with Catherine Bott looking at Francesco Cavalli's "Giasone". The work was the only collaboration between playwright and librettist Giacinto Andrea Cicognini and Cavalli - one of the great musical pioneers of the genre. Giasone became the most frequently performed opera of the 17th century and took its plot from the Greek myth of Jason and his search for the Golden Fleece. Catherine Bott introduces the background and musical highlights to the work and talks to the conductor, René Jacobs and the counter-tenor Michael Chance, who sang the eponymous role of Giasone, in the recording of the opera from the 1980s, about the merits of Cavalli as an operatic composer.