"This new recording of the work is taken from live performances at the Rossini in Wildbad Festival. With one notable exception (see below), Rossini’s original performers seem to have been a pretty talented bunch and the resulting piece requires a cast who can handle some seriously virtuoso music."

"Although Ciro in Babilonia was announced as a drama with chorus, or oratorio, to facilitate its performance in Lent, it is essentially Rossini’s early attempt at opera seria. As Ferrara had not seen L’Inganno Felice the composer re-used its overture with minor amendments. The celebratory chorus of the Babylonians is appropriately jolly as is that for some of the other serious situations in the work; in this respect it is no different to works by Donizetti or early Verdi. But the music also has its sophisticated moments and the composer did not hesitate to draw on parts of it for inclusion in his mature and orchestrally sophisticated Naples opera seria such as Mose in Egitto, his Lenten work of 1818 and which like Ciro had to have a biblical theme. Rossini had a major difficulty in accommodating the second soprano who was to sing Argene. He later condemned her as being impossibly ugly but also a poor singer. After investigation he discovered that she could sing the B flat above middle C and he wrote the aria Che disprezza gl’infelici (CD 2 tr.13) for her on that single note."

"This recording is of the revised edition from manuscripts of the period edited by Urs Schaffer 1984 but in a new version for Rossini in Wildbad by Antonino Fogliani. In listening to the work the variation in sophistication is frequently obvious. It also shows many signs of the works to come such as echoes of Tancredi, which followed in February 1813 at Venice’s premiere theatre, La Fenice. This work and L’Italiana in Algeri, three months later, set Rossini apart from the proliferation of contemporary competitors and ensured his future as an operatic composer."

"Anna Rita Gemmabella’s Ciro is the pick of the bunch. She sang the minor part of Carlotta in the Naxos recording of Torvaldo e Dorliska also from Bad Wildbad, where I found her singing vocally distinctive. Here, her flexible contralto is heard to good effect with strong characterisation overcoming the stop-start caused by the applause (CD 2 tr.11)."

"As Zambiri, the young bass Woitek Gierlach, a name new to me but who featured on Naxos’s recording of Meyerbeer’s Semiramide from Bad Wildbad, sings strongly and with sonority."

As Baldassare Riccardo Botta sings strongly, having a pleasing mid-voice tone".

"The performance serves as an introduction to this early Rossini work which has many pointers to his later opera seria. The booklet has an excellent introductory essay, a similarly skilled track-related synopsis and track listing."