Fortuna Chance

The central question was always about how much needs to be added to the surviving notes in order to make Poppea viable on stage. Gardiner and his advisers believe that nothing needs adding and that the 'orchestra' played only when explicitly notated in the score and was a very small group.

La diavolessa dates some way into the Galuppi/Goldoni canon, being the 13th of their joint ventures. It was first given during November 1755 at Teatro San Samuele in Venice, and like many of Galuppi’s operas soon traveled beyond the confines of Italy, being taken up in Leipzig and Prague in the year following its Venetian premiere. The motivational force of the plot is greed, but Goldoni also has some pertinent observations on social status to make. The action centers round the Naples home of Don Poppone, a wealthy fool obsessed by the belief that there is hidden treasure in his cellar.

Found by chance in a Florence archive, Germanico may be the first work that Handel composed in Italy. An allegory on the War of the Spanish Succession, it is low on incident but long on suavity. Harpsichordist Ottaviano Tenerani has pieced together a putative provenance from the scant documentation of Handel’s movements before 1709. Venetian watermarks on the manuscript paper, and the flux of pro- and anti-Habsburg feeling in Italy at the time, suggest to Tenerani that Germanico was written for private performance in 1706 and is indeed, as the anonymous copyist wrote, ‘Del Sigr Hendl’. If the discovery of Germanico marks a career boost for Tenerani, he has repaid the favour in this stylishly executed performance by the ensemble Il Rossignolo.