Stile Galante / Stefano Aresi PORPORA L'Amato Nome

Nicola Porpora’s Op 1 set of Italian chamber cantatas receive a new and striking reading directed by Stefano Aresi, a leading interpreter of the Late Baroque composer. Neapolitan-born Porpora brought his nuove musiche with him in the early 1730s when he had set out for London (with his pupil Farinelli) to take advantage of the perceived wavering of Handel’s operatic fame there. Porpora, espying an opportunity there just as Handel himself had done before, quickly ingratiated himself with the nobility in Britain and his 12 cantatas, though probably written in Naples, were published under the patronage of Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales of Great Britain. They enjoyed substantial success at the time, and reflecting the primacy of Italian music across Europe, not least through Porpora’s masterly settings of Pietro Metastasio’s texts extolling Arcadian tastes and ideals.

These dozen works are shared between four singers from Stile Galante – Francesca Cassinari and Emanuela Galli, sopranos, Giuseppina Bridelli and Marina De Liso, contraltos – who have developed their interpretations, including the use of contemporaneous embellishments (such as strascino and cercar della nota), with Stefano Aresi. In addition to directing the project, Aresi contributes a stimulating booklet essay for this new Glossa L’amato nome release which will do much for the cause of modern-day historical reinterpretation of Porpora’s chamber vocal music. (Glossa)

La Venexiana CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI Ottavo Libro dei Madrigali

What is a madrigal? An unsuspecting listener of Monteverdi’s Eighth Book would have trouble answering this question. The flagrant heterogeneousness of this collection tells us that for Monteverdi, the madrigal has gone from being a genre endowed with univocal traits to encompass a multitude of forms, whose objective nevertheless continues to be the representation of human passions through the link between oratione (the poetic text) and armonia (the music). We can say that Monteverdian madrigals make their transition from contemplation to beating pulse, from the look to the gesture, from sight to touch, in the Eighth Book. The collection hangs from a network of impossible balances. The traditional traits of the genre evaporate in what is precisely its last and most glorious celebration. An ambiguous terrain that, nevertheless, reveals itself as being full of possibilities and developments. The Madrigals of Love and War can appear as Monteverdi’s testament in this field, but also as an extraordinary range of proposals for the future. Even in the early 21st century, Monteverdi continues to speak to us with the force and immediacy ofa ‘contemporary’.

La Venexiana’s most eagerly anticipated recording, their rendering of the Eighth Book is here to stay as the definitive Italian version of what is Monteverdi’s most important publication together with L’Orfeo. Their forward-looking, suprisingly ‘modern’ vision of what key compositions such as the Ballo delle Ingrate, the Lamento della Ninfa or the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda should sound like is profoundly moving and will leave nobody cold. Definitely, this set will mark a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ in the interpretation of Monteverdi’s Madrigali Guerrieri et Amorosi. (GLOSSA)

Roberta Invernizzi / Emanuela Galli / Fabio Bonizzoni / La Risonanza HANDEL Le Cantate per il Marchese Ruspoli

In the autumn of last year Fabio Bonizzoni and La Risonanza embarked on a journey taking a fresh look – musicologically as well as musically – at the chamber cantatas to Italian texts and with instrumental accompaniment composed by Georg Frideric Handel during his stay in Italy. Where the first release on Glossa focused on works associated with Cardinal Pamphili in Rome, this new recording contains pieces – including the dramatic cantata Armida abbandonata and Handel’s ‘own’ Hunt Cantata – originating in the establishment of the Marquis Ruspoli and written for sopranos such as Margherita Durastante and Vittoria Tarquini.

Here it is the Milanese soprano Emanuela Galli who takes centre stage (and she also has taken on the role of Eurydice in Glossa’s recent recording of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo directed by Claudio Cavina). Roberta Invernizzi returns, joining forces with Galli, for Diana cacciatrice. Making use of recent research the booklet notes – written on this occasion by Karl Boehmer – help to illuminate for us Handel’s sojourn in Italy in 1707 and the origins of the five cantatas recorded here. (GLOSSA)

Allabastrina / La Pifarescha / Elena Sartori FRANCESCA CACCINI La liberazione di Ruggerio dall’isola di Alcina

With this production of Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggerio dall’isola di Alcina, directed by Elena Sartori, an important stepping-stone in the development of seventeenth-century opera receives a superb new recording from Glossa. For much of her career – Caccini was a composer, a virtuoso singer, a teacher, a poet and a multiinstrumentalist – she worked at the Medici court, and was commissioned by the grand duchess of Tuscany, Maria Maddalena of Austria, to write this commedia in musica for performance in Florence in 1625. Very probably this was the first opera composed by a woman, and its performance in Warsaw in 1628 stands as the first documented Italian opera known to have been staged outside the peninsula.

Caccini’s score, evoking not just the music of her father Giulio but that of Jacopo Peri and of the Monteverdi of Venice, is full of musical diversity and originality. The libretto of La liberazione (by Ferdinando Saracinelli, working from Ludovico Ariosto’s epic Orlando furioso) portrays the struggle between two sorceresses – one ‘good’, Melissa, the other ‘evil’, Alcina – over the young knight Ruggiero, who has been bewitched by Alcina.  

The singers recorded here for these roles are Gabriella Martellacci, Elena Biscuola and Mauro Borgioni, whilst other roles – in a score packed with vocal opportunities – are taken by Emanuela Galli, Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli and Raffaele Giordani. Elena Sartori, who directs the ensembles Allabastrina and La Pifarescha, also contributes an illuminating booklet essay placing Francesca Caccini in her musical and biographical context. (GLOSSA)