Gaetano Luca Filice

Gaetano Nasillo has two multi-awarded recordings on Zig Zag Territoires to his credit, both of them devoted to the Neapolitan school: the Cello Sonatas of Salvatore Lanzetti and an anthology of Concerti Napoletani, with Chiara Banchini and her Ensemble 415. Now he inaugurates his collaboration with Arcana with a programme of eight Sonatas for solo cello and continuo by the Venetian-born Antonio Caldara, composed five years before the publication of the famous cello sonatas of the most famous Venetian, Antonio Vivaldi. Written eighteen months before his death, these pages represent a substantial contribution to the late baroque repertoire of sonatas for solo cello.

Donizetti’s fiftieth opera, Marino Faliero, was first performed in Paris on 12 March 1835 with a cast comprising four of the finest singers of the period before premiering in London a few weeks later. Although both of these premieres were overshadowed by Bellini’s I Puritani, Marino Faliero subsequently enjoyed a long and successful run of international performances throughout the 19th Century before disappearing from the stage until its modern revival in 1966. Set in Venice in 1355, it remains a major work of Italian Romanticism, sentimental, martial, full of conspiratorial adventure and culminating with the execution of the leading character.

Composed for Venice in 1837, just a year-and-a-half after the fantastic success of Lucia di Lammermoor, Pia de' Tolomei "pleased altogether", in the composer's words. He revised it a couple of times thereafter and it was shown at various theaters as distant as Malta until 1855, after which it disappeared. It takes place in 13th-century Siena: Pia is married to Nello; his cousin Ghino loves her but she refuses his advances. Ghino angrily accuses Pia of adultery with an unknown man, who turns out to be Pia's brother, Rodrigo, and Nello imprisons her. Ghino eventually feels remorse and confesses his deception, but not soon enough to save Pia from being poisoned by Nello.

In the summer of 1830 the impresarios of Teatro Carcano contacted Donizetti and asked him to compose a new opera for the season’s opening. At the moment of signing the contract Donizetti still ignored the subject of the new opera; but he knew that the librettist would be Felice Romani and the female protagonist Giuditta Pasta. Success was resounding and unanimous, also with the critics. Donizetti had indeed reached artistic maturity. Anna Bolena tells of a human drama of solitude and oppression; it is a work of psychological introspection centred.

The booklet flags the “impressive similarity” between Giuseppe Gazzaniga’s Don Giovanni, premiered in February 1787, and Mozart’s masterpiece first heard in Prague later the same year. True, there are occasional superficial musical resemblances; and while Da Ponte despised the librettist Giovanni Bertati as a “dramatic cobbler”, he was happy to appropriate many of his ideas for his own Don Giovanni libretto. What strikes you time and again, though, is the fathomless gulf between Gazzaniga’s casually structured one-act romp, designed as a play-within-a-play for the Venice Carnival, and Mozart’s tragi-comic masterpiece.

Espousing the cause of the Institute for the Musical Heritage of Piedmont, over a ten-year period Opus 111 are issuing 50 discs of “Treasures of Piedmont”, mostly first recordings. The Academia Montis Regalis under Luigi Mangiocavallo has already opened our eyes and ears to orchestral music by Pugnani (10/96), perhaps the greatest violinist of his time. Now the same forces offer something well off the beaten track and only recently brought to light – a “musical translation” of Goethe’s novel Werther, which had been published a couple of decades previously. (The Baker-Slonimsky Dictionary, exceptionally, is totally wrong about this work.)