Opera Rara

Opera Rara is a British non-profit recording company, founded in the early 1970s by American Patric Schmid and Englishman Don White to promote concerts of rare and/or forgotten operas by bel canto era composers such as Italian composers Gaetano Donizetti, Giovanni Pacini, Saverio Mercadante, and Federico Ricci, as well as French composers of the 1830s forward such as Giacomo Meyerbeer.

The company's activities were later expanded to include the "Verdi Originals" series, which included the BBC's presentations of original versions of operas by Giuseppe Verdi which are better known in later, revised versions. An example of this group would be Verdi's Macbeth.

For many years Opera Rara was sponsored heavily by the Peter Moores Foundation. In 2011 Stephen Revell, the managing director of Opera Rara announced that conductor Mark Elder would join as new artistic director.

The label's first "complete" opera, Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto, was performed in concert in 1972 and featured the soprano Janet Price. It was the work's first revival in over 100 years, and was of such great interest to record collectors that it was almost immediately issued by several "pirates". Donizetti's Maria Padilla (again featuring Price) followed soon afterwards.

Other early concerts included Maria de Rudenz, Torquato Tasso, and Rosmonda d'Inghilterra (Donizetti), L'Etoile du Nord (Meyerbeer), as well as two Mercadante operas: Orazi e Curiazi and Virginia. All of these represented the first performances of these works in many years. Concert performances, leading to the issuance of recordings by the company, continue to be given at London's Southbank Centre with orchestras such as the London Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra. Prominent amongst conductors of these works is David Parry and Mark Elder.

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