Federico Maria Sardelli

From Dynamic comes the riveting opera performance of Olivo e Pasquale, a fan favorite that has delighted audiences for years. Known also as Melodramma giocoso, or romantic comedy opera about the title character brothers and their conflicting lives with those around them, this is the 1827 Neapolitan version with slight revisions and recorded for the first time at the 2016 Donizetti Festival of Bergamo.

This series of CDs by Tactus and Modo Antiquo represents the first complete recording of the cantatas of Antonio Vivaldi. Up until now, these works have appeared only sporadically on record, yet they constitute quite an important body of works in Vivaldi’s total production. Dedicated exclusively to female voices, the cantatas have here been divided according to the classifications used in the Ryom catalogue: cantatas for soprano and continuo, cantatas for contralto and continuo, cantatas for soprano and instruments, cantatas for contralto and instruments. Modo Antiquo has approached this first complete recording of the cantatas by Vivaldi with full respect for the original texts and the performance practices of the period.

Il Farnace is the most re-written and re-proposed of Vivaldi’s operas, it’s like a beloved child who worries his father, and to whom the parent always wants to give the best. Versions of Farnace, two in 1727 and one each in 1730, 1731 and 1732, had been conceived and adapted to the different circumstances for Venice, Prague, Pavia and Mantua, always with a cast to Vivaldi’s satisfaction and with the composer in control of the production.

This is the World Première Recording on Blu-ray of Cavalli’s opera Il Giasone. The plot is loosely based on the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, but the opera contains many comic elements too.
In the wake of Monteverdi, opera was enjoying a real boom in Europe and Francesco Cavalli was one of the most successful Venetian opera composers. Il Giasone was the single most popular opera of the 17th Century.

Handel's masterpiece Rinaldo is based on Torquato Tasso's epic La Gerusalemme liberata, which tells the tale of the attempted seduction of the hero by the enchantress Armida against the backdrop of the First Crusade. Musicologists agree that Handel carried out a major cut-and-paste exercise with Rinaldo, as more than two thirds of his 1711 score was taken from earlier works. This particular production by Pier Luigi Pizzi, conceived in 1985 for Teatro Romolo Valli in Reggio Emilia, has since travelled to some twenty major opera houses worldwide. Putting aside practical cuts and a few displacements of musical numbers, its durable attraction lies in the gorgeous costumes and scenery, a stylish paragon of 'hyperbaroque' that deliberately avoids both literalism and cheap provocation.

For more than twenty-five years now the popular image of Antonio Salieri has taken on the resentful personality given to him in the film Amadeus (1984). Salieri indeed has been waiting for nearly two hundred years to have his name cleared, since the suspicion that he eliminated Mozart started to circulate in the 1820s. What is absolutely certain is that Salieri neither kiIIed Mozart nor did anything to speed his demise on. Listening to Salieri's music, and in this particular instance, to Il mondo aIIa rovescia, an opera which has been exhumed after over two hundred years', we immediately find analogies with the language of Mozart's operas on librettos by Lorenzo Da Ponte. For over thirty years, Salieri was one of the foremost figures of theatrical life in Vienna, and clearly could not have been if he had not been endowed with an authentic, original musical talent. In reality, the problem of the reciprocal influence of Mozart and Salieri stiII needs to be clarified to a great extent.