SPONSORED: Ensemble. Melting Rhapsody - Malcolm Miller enjoys Jack Liebeck and Danny Driver's 'Hebrew Melody' recital, plus a recital by David Aaron Carpenter.
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SPONSORED: CD Spotlight. Beautifully Apt - Choral music by Herbert Howells, heard by Robert Anderson.
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Italian composer Antonio Maria Gasparo Gioacchino Sacchini was born in Florence on 14 June 1730 and grew up in Naples, where he studied.
He became known in Italy as a composer of operas, and then moved to London in 1772, producing works for the King's Theatre in Haymarket. He lived in Paris from 1781, becoming a patron of Marie Antoinette and also involved in various musical intrigues.
Antonio Sacchini died rather dramatically, in Paris, on 6 October 1786, aged fifty-six, just a few days after being told in person by Marie Antoinette that she had been pressured into having French composer Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne's opera performed instead of Sacchini's 1785 opera seria Œdipe à Colone. When this news caught the public imagination, Sacchini's opera went immediately into rehearsal, the packed first performance on 1 February 1787 was extremely successful, and the opera was then staged in Paris every year until 1830.