First performed in Naples in 1752, La Clemenza di Tito is often regarded as the most successful of the 20-odd operas that Gluck composed before the watershed of Orfeo ed Euridice in 1762. It sets the same Metastasio libretto that would provide the basis for Mozart's last stage work 39 years later, though treated in a much more prolix way – this recording, taken from concerts in Leverkusen last autumn, contains more than three and a half hours of music; Mozart's Clemenza runs to a little over two hours. And where Mozart was clearly fascinated by the relationship between Sesto and Vitellia in the opera, Gluck's treatment places Tito himself firmly at the centre of the action, though its musical highpoint remains Sesto's elaborate second-act aria, which Gluck later recycled in Iphigénie en Tauride. With Rainer Trost as Tito, Laura Aikin as Vitellia and Raffaella Milanesi as Sesto, this cast is vocally an assured one, and the performance under Werner Ehrhardt is certainly highly energised, perhaps occasionally just a bit too much so.