Moving back a century: the first Latin American opera composer to be performed in Europe was Antônio Carlos Gomes. No less than Verdi hailed the Brazilian as a “truly musical genius”. The best known of Gomes’s operas is IL GUARANY, premiered at La Scala, Milan in 1870. Now all but forgotten outside Gomes’s native country, Il Guarany is still a national treasure in Brazil. In 1994 Sony recorded the tragic opera complete in Bonn with Plácido Domingo as a Portuguese nobleman in 16th-century Brazil. Gramophone’s reviewer wrote: “The stars of this performance are Domingo in the title-role, ardent and committed, Verónica Villarroel on the most brilliantly stunning form I have heard her, and the capable and intelligent Carlos Álvarez. Both chorus and orchestra are excellent, and [conductor] John Neschling invests the whole with a real dramatic sense. Those who like full-blooded romantic opera should not miss this.”