E-Mail This Article to a Friend Early does it Hildegard von Bingen, Isabella of Castile, Conradi’s Ariadne, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo BY JEFFREY GANTZ

Mystic or migraine sufferer? That’s one question history can’t answer regarding Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), German abbess, visionary, theologian, composer, artist, and adviser to the great minds and personages of her day. Another is whether she herself composed all the music that’s appearing on a growing body of CDs or whether there was a convent-workshop aspect to the project. She did write the words — and the musical lines match them in originality.

The second Hildegard disc from Anonymous 4, following on 11,000 Virgins: Chants for the Feast of St. Ursula, takes as its theme the action of the Holy Spirit. The Origin of Fire: Music and Visions of Hildegard von Bingen (Harmonia Mundi) pairs six of her melismatic compositions with chanted settings of extracts from her writings to create a 66-minute piece of fire-breathing sung theology. As usual, the voices of Anonymous 4 — here Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer, Jacqueline Horner, and Johanna Maria Rose — are high, pure, reverberantly recorded, and a little wearing. (In her liner note, Hellauer aptly observes that "Hildegard’s compositions would almost certainly not have been sung consecutively in any service; they would have occurred occasionally, and must have seemed like exotic creatures alongside the everyday monastic chant.") On their O Jerusalem Hildegard disc (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi), Sequentia perform the hymn "O ignee spiritus" as if it were a song; Anonymous 4 do it like chant stylists, taking 10:02 to Sequentia’s 6:49. In the "Vision" that’s taken from her Scivias, Hildegard is visited by "a flame the color of air," and that describes this release. Essential for Hildephiles, but a better (though two-disc) introduction to her music and thought is Sequentia’s performance of her morality play Ordo Virtutum (DHM), Western music’s first opera.

Moving from musical theology to musical biography, we have Isabella I reina de Castilla (AliaVox), from Jordi Savall, a disc that’s subtitled "Lights and Shadows in the Time of the First Great Queen of the Renaissance, 1451–1504." This is the Isabella of Castile who with her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, bankrolled Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the New World, but she and Ferdinand also established the Inquisition (1478) and expelled unconverted Jews (1492) and Muslims (1502) from Spain, and in 1496 Pope Alexander VI gave them the title "Los Reyes Católicos."

Drawing on composers ranging from Guillaume Dufay to Pedro de Escobar and Juan del Enzina plus anonymous Sephardic and Muslim material, Isabella I traces her life: births, wars, treaties, coronations, and the death of the couple’s only son, Juan, in 1497. It’s the usual exemplary production from Catalan gambist Savall, who over the past decade has set early-music standards for performance (romantic and kinetic) and presentation (the lavish booklets of his AliaVox label) while drawing attention to Iberia’s Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions. Here he’s joined by the instrumental group Hespèrion XXI, the vocal group La Capella Reial de Catalunya, and his wife and daughter, Montserrat Figueras and Arianna Savall, in music that’s often grave (Johannes Cornago’s "Patres nostri peccaverunt") but just as often humorous, particularly when it’s taunting the French. An anonymous villancico tells us, "France’s game is slipping/It’s checkmate thanks to the queen!"; and one by Pedro de Tordesillas begins, "You pettifogging Frenchies/Tell me how it was/That you fled across the border/In dread of the great lion’s claws." It’s testimony to the wealth of this period that there’s almost no overlap between Isabella I and last year’s Testament reissue of the David Munrow disc Music for Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.

The liner note from Rui Vieira Nery is generous in overlooking the Catholic Monarchs’ shortcomings; what’s odder is that Nery makes no mention of Isabella’s two daughters. Catherine of Aragon was Henry VIII’s first wife and the mother of Queen Mary — Bloody Mary. Juana la Loca married Philip I; their son became Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (the subject of a 2000 Jordi Savall disc), and he in turn was the father of Philip II, who married Queen Mary (his first cousin once removed) and later sent the Armada against England. Perhaps Savall will give us the Spanish music of the later 16th century (notably Tomás Luis de Victoria) in a disc devoted to Philip II.

The overlooked tradition of Baroque Hamburg has been the focus of the Boston Early Music Festival in its two most recent opera productions, Johann Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow (1710) this year and Johann Georg Conradi’s Ariadne (1691) in 2003, and the latter, a BEMF performance recorded in Bremen in 2004, is now available as an attractively priced ($32) three-disc set from CPO. Christian Heinrich Postel’s libretto elaborates on the various Greek myths surrounding Theseus to create the melodrama so beloved of Baroque operagoers. Athenian Theseus is in Crete as a sacrifice to the Minotaur, but he’ll prevail against the half-man half-bull if he can get the help of Minos’s daughter Ariadne, who knows the secret of the labyrinth. His triumph would please her mother, Pasiphaë, who gave birth to the Minotaur after copulating with a bull and would like to see this reminder of her shame erased; it would not however, please her father, Minos, who’s eager to maintain Cretan hegemony over Athens and so wants Theseus erased. The good news for Theseus is that Ariadne loves him; the bad news is that he prefers her sister Phaedra. All the same, he tells Ariadne he loves her, and when Phaedra overhears and upbraids him, he has to backtrack, and then of course Ariadne overhears that. (It’s a Baroque-opera trope: Josennah, Axinia, and Olga perform the same dance in Boris Goudenow.) That’s not complicated enough, so we also have mystery man Evanthes, who loves Ariadne and is her parents’ chosen suitor; after Theseus deserts her, he’ll reveal himself to be Bacchus.

Three hours of agonizing over love and duty works no worse for Postel and Conradi than it would for Mozart and Wagner; the mythic scenario gives backbone to Postel’s characters the same way it would Wagner’s, and Conradi in his kicky dance music (try the scissors-grinders’ chorus at the end of act one) shows himself an apt pupil of Praetorius and Schein. Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin in the title role is the vocal anchor of this performance, as scintillating in Bremen as she was in Boston. Ellen Hargis as Phaedra and Venus, Matthew White as Evanthes/Bacchus, and Jan Kobow as the comic Pamphilius are also back from the Boston production. James Taylor holds up his end as Theseus, but Barbara Borden’s Phaedra seems a little thin.

Baroque opera was nothing if not visually luxuriant, and a glance at the handsome booklet reminds one what this CD is missing. Did Radio Bremen videotape the Bremen performances? Is a DVD in the offing?

The same question haunts the latest CD release of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 opera L’Orfeo, from Jean-Claude Malgoire, La Grande Écurie, and La Chambre du Roy. Malgoire is of the rough-and-ready rather than the emasculatedly academic school of early-music performance, and this production, which was recorded live in the French-Belgian border city of Tourcoing last October, is unexceptionable in its beauty and energy. But the liner photos — Kobie van Rensburg’s ardent Orfeo, Cyrille Gerstenhaber’s voluptuous Euridice, Philippe Jaroussky’s embracing La Speranza, Delphine Gillot’s goth Proserpina — make you wonder what you’re not seeing. Not only does the CPO Ariadne have no video competition, it has no CD competition, and it’s not likely to any time soon. There are other good CD Orfeos (Nikolaus Hanoncourt on Teldec for quirky, Sergio Vartolo on Naxos for cheap), however, and everybody’s trumped by the BBC DVD, where Jordi Savall, leading the same forces as on the Isabella CD at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, has Furio Zanasi as Orfeo, Arianna Savall as Euridice, Montserrat Figueras as La Musica, and dancers who seem to have come on stage directly from a Botticelli canvas or Canto X of Paradiso.