Roberta Invernizzi / Sonia Prina / Ensemble Claudiana / Luca Pianca AMORE E MORTE DELL'AMORE

An album of Baroque love duets seems to tumble off the presses every other month. Not that I’m complaining when the results are as good as this. The programme is unclichéd, ranging from Monteverdi’s Seventh and Eighth Books of Madrigals, via little-known pieces by Benedetto Marcello, Lotti and Durante, to two chamber cantatas composed by the young Handel immediately after his triumphant Italian sojourn. And in Roberta Invernizzi and Sonia Prina, Naïve have netted the two most exciting Italian Baroque specialists of their generation.
Native speakers have a head start, of course, in Monteverdi’s humanist-inspired declamatory recitative. With their pure, almost instrumental timbres, musical intelligence and acute yet unexaggerated feeling for verbal sound and sense, Invernizzi and Prina make well-nigh ideal partners. Their precision and blend are uncanny. In the languidly melancholic ‘Interrotte speranze’ they point the harmonic clashes and shape the cadences with exquisite taste, using vibrato discreetly and tellingly. ‘Mentre vaga angioletta’, a hymn to the spirit of music, provokes riots of giddy yet perfectly controlled coloratura. Their voices then entwine in hushed ecstasy in the final duet from L’incoronazione di Poppea, long known not to be by Monteverdi – though there’s no whisper of this in the inadequate booklet-note, the one serious blot on the whole production.
Moving forward a century, soprano and contralto are no less intense in the masochistic adoration of Lotti’s Giuramento amoroso and Durante’s darkly brooding Son io barbara donna. They spar gleefully with each other in the two Handel cantatas. Throughout the disc the continuo battery of Ensemble Claudiana provides colourful support, while violinist Riccardo Minasi relishes both the inwardness and percussive boldness of a rare sonata by Domenico Scarlatti. But the disc belongs to Invernizzi and Prina, who aptly cap a feast of glorious Baroque singing with volleys of delighted Handelian virtuosity. (Richard Wigmore / Gramophone)

Sonia Prina / laBarroca / Ruben Jais GLUCK Heroes in Love

There is definitely no lack of heroic roles in the Gluckian repertory apart from the very well-known Orfeo from Orfeo ed Euridice: many memorable parts were assigned by this composer for the alto voice (either male castratos or female contraltos) – and it is precisely this repertory, written for excellent interpreters and yet still rarely performed today, which is celebrated on this CD.

As a consequence of a specific historical set of circumstances, Gluck had the good fortune to work with the final alto singers of his generation: not only Gaetano Guadagni, but also Giovanni Carestini, Vittoria Tesi and many others. Until the first part of the 18th century, the contralto register was the one especially favoured for heroic male roles and for those of heroines en travesti. Much of this repertory remains unexplored and of course unrecorded: with this new programme, Glossa tries to help filling a somewhat unexplainable gap.

Sonia Prina, one of the leading altos of her generation, teams up with the fine Milanese laBarocca orchestra, conducted by Ruben Jais, for her first full-scale opera recital on disc: and this after having sung the leading role in Handel’s pasticcio Catone, very recently released on Glossa, and anticipating her mind-blowing performance in Silla, another Handelian opera, with Fabio Biondi – to be presented in Autumn, as well on Glossa.

Natalie Dessay / Emmanuelle Haïm / Le Concert D'Astrée HANDEL Cleopatra Arias from Giulio Cesare

The fact that the role of Handel's Cleopatra includes enough music to fill out a CD, and that, combined with the music's demands for immense virtuosity and versatility, makes it a daunting challenge and Natalie Dessay is impressive in her account of these excerpts. Dessay's singing is not entirely consistent throughout the album, recorded in 2010, whether because some arias are simply better suited to her voice than others, or because she was not at her best for some of the recording sessions. While the agility and precision of her coloratura are always intact, in some selections, such as the arias "Tutto può donna vezzosa," and "Venere bella," Dessay's voice sounds lighter than it does on albums from earlier in her career, and even a little breathy in her lower register. In other arias, though, she conveys the remarkable fullness and purity for which she is renowned. "Se pieta di me non senti" is breathtaking; her gleaming tone is practically voluptuous and she spins lines of miraculously velvety smoothness and searing emotional intensity. "Piangerò la sorte mia" and the substitution aria "Per dar vita all'idol mio" are other highlights that showcase Dessay at her most vocally and dramatically dazzling. Mezzo-soprano Sonia Prina as Caesar is a capable partner for Dessay in several recitatives and the duet, "Caro! Bella!" Emmanuelle Haïm and Le Concert d'Astrée, frequent collaborators with Dessay, bring their characteristic finesse, spirited intelligence, and dramatic urgency to the music, and the realizations of the continuo parts are especially inventive. Virgin Classics' sound is exceptionally vivid and present, with good balance. (Stephen Eddins)

Roberta Invernizzi / Sonia Prina / Ensemble Claudiana / Luca Pianca AMORE E MORTE DELL'AMORE

The duet madrigal, chamber cantata, or aria was a prime form of the early Baroque, ready-made for a noble family that wished to display its house singers and even draw from them a little bit of competition. There are a number of albums in the genre on the market, but Amore e morte dell'amore (Love and the Death of Love), from reigning Baroque soprano queen Roberta Invernizzi and newer contralto talent Sonia Prina, stands out from the crowd. First there are the rich voices of the singers themselves, who could sing a random web search page and make it sound good, and their razor-sharp coordination. Second is the program, which traverses the entire 17th century and moves into the 18th, holding everything together thematically and largely avoiding well-known numbers (other than the finale duet from Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea), touching on some unusual mid-century finds by Antonio Lotti and Francesco Durante, with a well-placed ensemble treatment of a Domenico Scarlatti sonata as an interlude. That piece shows off the talents of the Ensemble Claudiana, new faces on the historical-performance scene. Above all these individual factors is their coherence into an overall package. Invernizzi and Prina get the intimate chamber quality of most of this music, its natural habitat of a music room with a group of connoisseurs who were ready to listen closely. They are virtuosic, lithe, and playful, even when they approach a serious text. Naïve supports them beautifully with studio sound. Highly recommended. (James Manheim)

Emmanuelle Haïm / Le Concert d'Astrée HANDEL Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno

Handel wrote the secular oratorio Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The triumph of Time and of Enlightenment) to the text of one of his patrons, Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, in Rome in 1707. The libretto, which doesn't stand up to close logical scrutiny, centers on Beauty, who must choose between self-indulgent Pleasure and the austerity of allegiance to Time and Enlightenment. Needless to say, any patron entering the theater for the performance, having noted the title on the playbill, would have no doubt about the outcome of the struggle, so dramatic suspense cannot have been one of the inducements for an eighteenth century audience. The rewards, however, are real, most notably Handel's remarkably fertile inventiveness and musical ingenuity, which justified sitting through a two-and-a-half-hour performance that was guaranteed to be a dramatic non-starter. Handel keeps recitatives to a minimum, and the oratorio is rich in musical substance and variety. With this CD there's the added attraction of stellar vocal and instrumental performances. Emmanuelle Haïm leads le Concert d'Astrée in a light and sparkling reading, and the energy never lags. Soprano Natalie Dessay as Bellezza is vulnerably delicate, but also has reserves of temperamental strength, and she brings real warmth to the personification. As Piacere, mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg is beguilingly tempting, displaying more than a little naughtiness, and she sings with absolute security and ravishing tonal beauty. Alto Sonia Prina, as Disingenno, is a genuine coloratura alto, with dazzling agility as well as a full, pure tone. Pavol Brslik, as Tempo, has a light but focused and pleasing tenor, and he nails the composer's virtuosic demands. Virgin's sound is immaculate, with depth and ideal resonance. (Stephen Eddins)

Emmanuelle Haïm / Le Concert D'Astrée HANDEL La Resurrezione

Continuing the Handel series from Le Concert d’Astrée and Emmanuelle Haïm is La resurrezione, composed during the young Handel’s period in Rome and first performed there in 1708. The work recounts the events of Easter and the solo singers portray Lucifer, Mary Magdalene, an Angel, St John the Evangelist, and St Mary Cleophas.

It calls upon a large orchestra, led and directed at the first performance by the master violinist Arcangelo Corelli. The role of Mary Magdalene, here performed by the lush-voiced young British soprano (and EMI Classics artist) Kate Royal, was sung at the first performance by the celebrated Margherita Durastanti, even though the Pope had forbidden female singers to perform in public.

In April 2009, Emmanuelle Haïm led a performance of La resurrezione at London’s Barbican Centre, part of a tour which also covered Paris, Dijon, Aix-en-Provence, Lille, Pamplona, Valladolid and Salzburg. The Guardian reported that: “Emmanuelle Haïm's understanding of the relationship between sense and sensuality in Handel has marked her out as one of his finest interpreters, and her performance with her own Concert d'Astrée was notable for its immediacy and expression. The playing had touches of magic as recorders and flutes comforted the uncomprehending saints, and flaring brass heralded the arrival of a new dawn … Camilla Tilling's joyous Angel let fly volleys of flamboyant coloratura … while the great Sonia Prina was vocally spectacular and immensely moving as Mary Cleophas.”

The Salzburg performance led the Salzburger Nachrichten to describe the “springy mastery” of the ensemble, “with sparkling accents from the trumpets, lute and gamba … A Baroque highpoint in an Easter Festival dominated by Romanticism.” Drehpunkt Kultur described Luca Pisaroni’s Lucifer as “dangerously honed” and Toby Spence as “a master of subtle ornamentation”. Overall, the ensemble of singers was “technically and stylistically at the peak of today’s Handel interpretation”, while Haïm herself “knows how to ignite her ensemble to such powerful effect and then to restrain the emotion once more, so that the force of expression never runs wild.”