I am about to come with my Insula orchestra, which I founded three years ago, to the UK for the first time to perform at the Barbican on 21 September (in a programme of Mozart, Zelenka and CPE Bach). And to pave the way for our arrival, our second recording is about to be released – that of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (on September 11). For Insula and my accentus choir, it is our first recording of opera and our first disc for Archiv. It came about after a concert in Versailles with Franco Fagioli as Orfeo alongside Malin Hartelius as Eurydice and Emmanuelle de Negri as the mischievous Cupid.

Orfeo ed Euridice has been one of my favourite operas since I sang the 1762 version while at the Sorbonne. I have lived with René Jacobs’s recording of Orfeo for many years and I love it. Going back to this opera always takes me back to my studies in Vienna under my mentor Nikolaus Harnoncourt. I was really keen to do the original version from Vienna in 1762 but we are also incorporating highlights from the Paris score – including the Air des Furies, the magnificent flute solo in the Elysian Fields plus Orfeo’s famous aria at the end of Act 1. 

The Vienna version was written for the Italian castrato Gaetano Guadagni. Of course, it is very difficult nowadays to recreate the colour of the castrato voice, but there is no doubt that among present-day countertenors, the voice of Franco Fagioli comes closest to that of the castrati of Gluck’s day. He has a voice with a bel canto technique capable of producing an extended cantabile line and with an incredible rapidity for the coloratura passage work. 

We have created a new video diary to draw in new audiences to this disc – it’s a log-book over five episodes called Lorenzo & Berenice, in which a young dedicated fan called Lorenzo follows my performance and meets a girl with whom he falls instantly in love. Lorenzo takes her to one of our concerts to convert her to opera through Orpheus’s unflinching devotion to Eurydice, which gives him the courage to confront death to save his love. The last episode in the series ends with me in a rather compromising position – I won’t give the ending away. We will be releasing each episode gradually over the coming weeks.

I love using digital media to get to new audiences and with our graphic design agency we have managed to reach out to younger ones – our previous series of videos on a number of different platforms have generated 100,000 viewers. It is so important to be doing this and not taking for granted that the next generation will continue to come to concert halls to discover classical music.

I have already had my chamber choir – accentus – for some 18 years but it’s been thrilling establishing this new orchestra, especially as it is creating further opportunities for us to explore opera. It is a period-instrument orchestra and we specialise in the Classical and pre-Romantic period, also uncovering several forgotten or little performed works. However I am not such a purist in my approach – I appreciate historically informed performances but it needs to make sense musically as well.

As such, for our forthcoming concert at the Barbican, I wanted to bring an unusual programme including Zelenka’s Miserere in C minor (a beautiful contribution to sacred music), Mozart’s well-known Solemn Vespers, and CPE Bach’s Magnificat. This is only our second concert outside France (following our visit to Salzburg last year) but in the coming season, you will see Insula in Basel and then Vienna, where we reunite with Franco Fagioli for a semi-staged production of Lucio Silla.