Enrico Onofri

25 years after the revolutionary recording with Il Giardino Armonico, Enrico Onofri presents a new exciting version of Vivaldi's Le quattro Stagioni on PASSACAILLE, in which he has put all his artistic maturity and knowledge into practice. The focus of the recording is not only on Vivaldi. Onofri also wanted to pay tribute to Mother Nature, who has inspired artists of all genres with her sounds, images, smells and wonders. The selected pieces that accompany the Evergreen come from the Italian repertoire of the 17th century.

In his first recording for PASSACAILLE, Real Câmara revives the spirit of the excellent Portuguese court orchestra before the great earthquake of 1755, bringing to life a forgotten repertoire once written for performance at the magnificent court of King John V. in Lisbon: from the divertimenti of Pietro Giorgio Avondano, the Genoese concertmaster of the orchestra, to opera arias by the Portuguese composer Francisco António de Almeida and the Italian composers Rinaldo di Capua and Giovanni Bononcini.

The prologue is a unique feature of early baroque opera: an opening scene where an allegorical figure enters the stage to prepare the audience for the musical drama to come. Thus Prologue is the musical introduction of Italian star soprano Francesca Aspromonte and her exclusive, long term engagement with Pentatone, promising great joy as well as drama in the years to come. Prologue is a highly original album consisting of several prologues from early-baroque operas by Monteverdi, Caccini, Cavalli, Landi, Rossi, Cesti, Stradella and Scarlatti. Strung together, they form a representation in a single act, a theatre full of small, complete dramas: the opera before the opera. Francesca Aspromonte is quickly establishing herself as a shining star in the Baroque firmament. She has curated this album together with musical director Enrico Onofri, who leads il pomo doro, one of the most important and successful period ensembles of today.

Antonio Mazzoni was a fairly prolific Italian composer in the middle and late 18th century (1717–1785), and he Read more Antigono for the opening season of one of the world’s shortest-lived opera houses: the Ópera do Tejo in Lisbon. It opened on March 31, 1755, and was destroyed seven months later by an earthquake. (Its site is now a navy dockyard.) The libretto is by the famed Metastasio, and Mazzoni was clearly considered an important figure in his time. Metastasio wrote the librettos of the only three serious operas performed in the seven months of life for the opera house in Lisbon, and the choice of Mazzoni to write the music for one of them demonstrates his reputation at the time. He wrote perhaps 19 operas (we aren’t sure), many of which have not survived. Antigono is performed here in a critical edition edited by Nicholas McNayr.