Blanco Bruciasse IL Cielo

Universally admired for his keyboard music, the vocal music of Domenico Scarlatti has until very recently been largely ignored. For many years, the opera Tolomeo e Alessandro was known only from a manuscript of Act I in a private collection in Milan. Recently the entire opera turned up in England and surprisingly revealed that Domenico was after all a very fine dramatic composer, perhaps even more appealingly so than his father Alessandro. It is tempting to think that Handel, whose Tolomeo uses the same libretto, may have known this setting by his old friend, 'Mimmo', and tried to outdo him in setting the same texts to music. He was not always successful.

The cantata, to some extent, is a development from the madrigal that appeared in Italy at the start of the seventeenth century. While the madrigal was refined and delicate, the cantata evolved because composers felt the need to introduce a dramatic narrative element into vocal chamber music and thusly the music took a lighter, wittier turn.
Scarlatti is considered as one if the initiators, and also one of the reformers of this genre, whose outlines he established. In his cantatas for a single solo voice and continuo, Scarlatti treats the latter as a true partner of the voice.

Alan Curtis' stellar recording of Alcina, which joins a respectable number of very fine recordings of the opera, is remarkable for the supple liveliness of his conducting and the outstanding performances of the soloists. The elasticity of his performance, leading Il Complesso Barocco, should dispel any misconceptions about Baroque music being rigid and metronomic. The nuanced care with which he brings out the emotional depth of Handel's writing is evident from the first measures of the overture and enlivens the entire opera.

One of Handel’s rarer operas, Arminio, set at the time of the Roman Empire, was first performed in 1737. “On the evidence of this very fine recording,” said Gramophone when this performance first appeared, “it can stand among the best of the Handel operas, full of beautiful and imaginative things.” Conducting a cast led by the virtuosic Vivica Genaux in the title role – composed for the castrato Domenico Annibali – is the renowned Handel specialist Alan Curtis.

The scope and grandeur of Handel's operatic output – the musical variety and inventiveness, the depth of psychological insight, as well as the sheer volume of works – continue to astonish as new operas are brought to light and more familiar works are given productions and recordings that do justice to the material. Ariodante, written in 1735, is nowhere nearly as frequently performed as the more famous operas like Giulio Cesare, but neither is it entirely obscure, and there have been several very fine modern recordings. This version with Alan Curtis leading Il Complesso Barocco can be recommended without reservation to anyone coming to the opera for the first time or for anyone who's already a fan.

Handel’s sparkling opera Partenope reunites countertenor Philippe Jaroussky and soprano Karina Gauvin, who both made such an impact in the recording of Steffani’s rediscovered Niobe – released by Erato in early 2015 and welcomed by Gramophone as “a landmark event”. Every moment of Partenope’s comedy, romance and drama is captured by the dynamic conductor Riccardo Minasi and his ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro.

Alessandro Scarlatti’s oratorio is an exciting drama of life, love and death, set in the 4th century Roman Empire. Preferring to devote her life to God, Teodosia rejects the love of Arsenio, the son of the Roman governor, and welcomes death. St. Theodosia of Tyre died at the age of 18, in the year 308. One cannot help but be struck by the dramatic strength and the vocal beauty of this work, performed here by a very talented cast, including Emmanuelle de Negri, Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, Anthea Pichanick, Renato Dolcini and the fiery orchestra, Les Accents, led by Thibault Noally.